There were two kinds of response to the news that the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska had won this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. One was outrage, ably expressed by the Swedish literary agent who said that the whole notion of the prize had by now been debased if it could be awarded to so “insular” and obscure a figure. The other was an audible gulp on the part of literary editors, followed, half an hour's meagre research later, by obsequious endorsement expressed in suitably opaque mumbo-jumbo—opacity was, of course, necessary because very few of them had ever read a word written by the woman.

If the charge of obscurity means that Szymborska is a difficult poet to understand, that would be quite the opposite of the truth—as anyone will discover who reads this excellent Harper and Row edition of her selected poems, now published here by Faber. Szymborska is enlightened, humorous, sceptical, humanistic—but never hermetic (which is at least one of the meanings of obscure).

Another meaning is just as pertinent: that we've never heard of her. The edition of her work that appeared in the UK six years ago came from Forest Books, one of those small poetry presses that get so little national coverage. What other way, unless one happens to be a devoted reader of poetry magazines, is there of finding out what is being published? But Szymborska is much less “obscure” a figure in America. There have been at least three different English-language translations of her poetry in print over there.

Why, given her evident stature as a poet, has she had so little attention here? Al Alvarez has much to answer for. From the late 1960s Alvarez edited the influential Penguin European Poets series. Its Polish poets in that series—names fairly well-known in this country—included Tadeusz Rozewicz and Zbigniew Herbert. These poets were lucky—if that is the apposite word. Their work proves them to have been “covert witnesses” to the horrors of the neo-Stalinist regime, beneath whose boot they struggled to survive. Alvarez said recently how much he envied them their “relevance” to the societies in which they fought so heroically.

Szymborska wasn't much of a heroine of that kind. She was one of those quiet people who probably loathed the government but got on with her life, perhaps seeing its behaviour as rather typical of rulers down the ages (see, for example, that marvellous poem “Voices”).

Alvarez edited The Faber Book of European Poetry in 1992, long after Szymborska had written her best work. She wasn't in that book either. She has still not mounted the barricades. The Nobel judges had to push her into the limelight—and my guess is that she is hating it.