SOURCE: Karasek, Krzysztof. “Mozartian Joy: The Poetry of Wislawa Szymborska.” In The Mature Laurel: Essays on Modern Polish Poetry, edited by Adam Czerniawski, pp. 191-98. Wales, U.K.: Poetry Wales Press, Ltd/Seren Books/Dufour, 1991.

In the following essay, Karasek examines how Szymborska is able to portray “the totality of art” within her poetry and argues that “each of [Szymborska's poems is an autonomous world, a world in itself.”]

In the twentieth century the Word has become—like it or not—a dramatic battleground. At the same time, a shrinking of art's domain and the annexation of this area by knowledge (in the case of the avant-garde) and politics (in the case of committed art)—just as in the Middle Ages it had been annexed by religion—has contracted the territory of autonomous poetic reality, the reality of a poetry which draws strength from its own resources; it...