The End and the Beginning

Wisława Szymborska came of age during World War II. Born in 1923, she was a part of the Columbus Generation: a group of young writers and creatives born around 1920 whose adolescence was shaped by war and occupation (see: “Historical Context”). This generational title was specifically used to describe those writers, like Szymborska, whose art was influenced by the horrors and day-to-day realities of living through a major historical event.

Szymborska’s poetry is seminal to the Polish poetic canon. Her poems are deceptively simple and direct, making her work extremely difficult to categorize within one school of poetry alone. Szymborska employs the irony and wit characteristic of postmodernism in many of her poems, but also works to expand the postmodern movement by examining the specifically domestic details of historical conflicts. For Szymborska, this is what traditional concepts of history lack: an emphasis on the ordinary. Her voice is distinct, unlike any other poet writing at the time, and it is Szymborska’s ability to articulate the importance of everyday struggles in an accessible tone that ensures her poetry’s global acclaim.