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| Wislawa
Szymborska (b. 1923) was too young to make her debut before the
war. After an early short socialist-realist episode, she gradually
worked her way into the Pantheon of modern Polish poetry. As a result,
her Nobel Prize in 1996, awarded for "poetry that with ironic
precision allows the historical and biological context to come to
light in fragments of human reality" came as a surprise only to
the nominee. It is perhaps this "ironic precision" that
makes her poetry incredibly difficult for academic dissecting; her
free, almost conversational style - one can almost figure her chatting
her poems away over coffee in her little apartment at Chocimska Street
in Krakow (conveniently located next to a small but sufficient
open-air food market) - is characteristic of a poetry that is
misleadingly simple and simply philosophical. At times, she
concentrates on a single object with microscopic precision; at times,
she pinpoints the essence of a multifaceted phenomenon.
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