SOURCE: "Near a People's Heart," in Los Angeles Times, October 4, 1996, p. B8.

[In the following essay, the critic considers the significance of Szymborska's award to Polish letters.]

"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," Percy Shelley once said. He was speaking from early 19th-century Europe, a world away from 1990s America, where unacknowledged power is more likely to lie with spin doctors and political action committees. What Shelley said, however, largely remains true in Poland today: The country has been carved up so many times by invaders since the late 18th century that its heart has remained whole only in its literature.

This is what makes Wislawa Szymborska, who Thursday was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, both a political and artistic leader. The intellectual Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz may be better known abroad, but Szymborska is the real "people's poet" of her nation.

You wouldn't guess...