SOURCE: "Subversive Activities," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XLIII, No. 7, April 18, 1996, pp. 35-6.

[In the following essay, Hirsch provides an overview of Szymborska's career, analyzing subversive elements in her poetry.]

Wislawa Szymborska, with Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Rózewicz, is one of the major living Polish poets of the generation after Milosz. Of the four Szymborska is the least well-known in America, perhaps because she has remained in Poland, and because she shuns the public eye. Little is known about her private life; she has rarely been interviewed. Yet, as in the case of Elizabeth Bishop, her reticence is accompanied by considerable literary ambition. Like Herbert, she has mounted in her work a witty and tireless defense of individual subjectivity against collectivist thinking, and her poems, like his, are slyly subversive in a way that compels us to reconsider received opinion. In both, the rejection...