Topics in 20th Century Literature

Eva Diaz

Topics in 20th Century Literature

Dr. Stephen Meyers

Research Paper

October 10, 2012

Wislawa Szymborska

On July 2, 1923, one of the most influential poets was born in Poland, Wislawa Szymborska. She grew up during an era in which Nazi Germany was taking over, she was alive for military coups, a new Constitution and when the economy was a bad one (Wikipedia). During World War II, she was forced to continue her education in underground classes. In 1943, she worked as a railroad employee and managed to avoid being deported to Germany as a forced laborer. Her career started when she began illustrating English-language textbooks. She also took to writing poems and stories. In 1945, Szymbroska began to student Polish literature then switched to sociology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. She became influenced by Czeslaw Milosz once she started writing at school. In March 1945, her first poem, "Szukan slowa" was published in the daily newspaper. Throughout the years, her poems were continuously published in newspapers and periodicals. In 1948, she stopped schooling because of financial issues and married Adam Wlodek. Szymborska's first book was published in 1949, but never passed censorship because it "did not meet socialist requirements." She joined the staff of a literary review magazine from 1953-1981. Throughout her life, she won numerous awards; The Goethe Prize in 1991, the Herder Prize in 1995 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996, to name a few (Wikipedia).

Her works were mainly philosophical, they were typically ironic, paradoxical, contradictory and understated, many of them featured war and terrorism (Ashbery). For instance, her poem, "On Death, without Exaggeration", is a morbid poem. She personifies death, as many people do, but she didn't make him seem like a normal human. She paints death almost as a drone, all he knows how to do is take lives, even though she doesn't give him physical characteristics, it is easy to imagine him as a person, an incompetent one at that.

"It can't even get things done

That are part of its trade:

Dig a grave,

Make a coffin,

Clean up after itself."

Throughout the poem, she is depicting personality characteristics, as shown in the lines above, she is making him seem lazy. She also portrays death as a bumbling fool:

"Preoccupied with killing,

It