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 has in effect contracted the realm of true poetry, and therefore of what can be called poetry. Nevertheless, it remains a territory sufficiently large to express within it the reality of human fate on earth, the reality of humans immersed in time and aware of it, without recourse to any other categories beside the Word. Pursued by the Chimera of reality or metaphysics, mutilated by the Erynies of history and the demons of internal contradictions, poets dedicate less and less space to poetry as art, to poetry perceived as a perfect shape, a fulfilment. A sketch, a hasty drawing, a barely-pronounced expression of the mouth, a line of the lips, convey the fullness of the world. A curtailment of the intellect, a curtailment of the imagination, specifically excludes elements of thought. Linguistic and epistemological density replaces form. Contemporary poetry at its best has embodied itself most completely in forms that are hurried, sketchy, full of drama and tensions. And yet the deeper we plunge in time (or rather, the deeper time plunges us), we discover all the more certainly that the Chimera of obsessions cannot be tamed; we cannot cure the imagination by fighting it. The Chimera gorges herself at our expense, and the more we struggle with her, the more we define her symmetry, the more we confirm her domain.

So we are overcome with nostalgia for art in its fullness and distinctiveness, in which it would again be possible to grasp ‘the totality’ of art—not of the sketch, but of the full shape, of plenitude. An art which is not a morass but a hard, rocky base—which instead of a quagmire offers something more durable on which to stand, or even (who knows?)—perhaps even build a house. Something not lacking either joy or tragedy, but retaining in our human dimensions a full warmth of the dramatic. Art which offers something on which we lean, in which one might take shelter during “a pestilential time”, “a wretched time” (“what use a poet in wretched times?”), a hostile time. And time is indeed hostile to man and his reveries, above all those focussed on the Word.

There are very few figures in Polish poetry who achieve this, poets who create such a world-house—among them only Zbigniew Herbert and Wislawa Szymborska (poets of wise maturity) have tried to create a language which keeps pace with elementary human needs. But they each lead us to very different world-houses: Herbert's is inhabited from cellar to roof; from floor to ceiling with gods and memories of history—both of history happening within us and of that which precedes us, with the relicts of a ruined and defeated world, though its artefacts survive and preserve its name. Here precisely in its human-historical and sacral dimensions lies the saving strength of objects. Szymborska's is the world-house of our daily lives, our ordinary life and death. A world where tears are salty and rain is wet, in which ‘love’—in Herbert's words—“means love, and death means death”.

Poets of wise maturity find their true voice late. How high a price they pay for the moderation of their passions, for the defeat of the Chimera, can be known only by someone who had himself pitted his strength against hers. We, who are the true offspring of Dionysus, that is of Chaos, are well aware that the secret extorted from Apollo is rarely won without punishment. ‘Apollo and Marsyas’, one of Herbert's most personal poems, portrays this quarrel between logic and imagination, rules and exceptions, and between the known and the incomprehensible, in a way that is moving and accessible even to a novice.

A poet of obsession discharges his tensions and fears, while the Apollonian poet suppresses them by an effort of will and intellect. But they constantly live in him, return to him; if he choked them he would cease to be a good poet and become a didact, a rhetorician, a fiddler constantly scraping the same old tunes. These tensions and fears return at the most inappropriate moments. Chimeras, Harpies, Erynies and Maenads return to mutilate the poet's flesh, the flesh of Orpheus, Orestes and Marsyas; for extorting secrets from them, they tear him to shreds. Poets of wise maturity are a fixed point of reference in our bustling, excessively bustling world. The very fact that they exist lightens our own existence and strengthens us in our identity and in the certainty that the world nevertheless exists and not merely is. Can our world become a house? If we ask that question when reading Szymborska, then perhaps we are already on its threshold.

Most importantly, we must first know what is most important in the house, we must establish a hierarchy of values. A hierarchy for us. Our own hierarchy, verifiable by us, because those others were fixed without us, before our arrival in the world, and are therefore not sufficient for us. They include father and mother as basic categories, a common point of departure. This is best seen in Herbert, whose world begins with a description of his own (and thus first) parents. Father, a first visible god (or a substitute for God), the giver of values, a signpost through the world's dark by-ways; and mother, the earth's warm embrace, always ready to welcome the errant wanderer. Then the world of objects: table, chair, bed, a glass on the table, a window, a view onto the street (“Eyes are hands”, says Voltaire), a door; these are the elements defining the boundaries of our visible world, our home. A bond grows between objects and people; and thus language is born. It is created by a need to give expression to the drama of existence. A drama occurring between men and objects. A drama also of language, since words are objects in motion and like objects they undergo destruction, corruption, erasure, are insufficient, transient, and in their deepest essence betray men and choose the world.

Wislawa Szymborska belongs to this world. She is a poet of material objects, of insignificant everyday events, commonplace conversations, everyday reality; the theme of myth, of culture, only rarely enters her work, usually only as a justification of ordinariness. Perhaps her option is realistic (if such a term has any sense whatever in poetry) because in poetry, as nowhere else, the illusoriness of the real world manifests itself. In some sense, everything here is at once the same and not the same; the character of Szymborska's vision is comparable to representational painting. Her deformations do not exceed either Picasso's Cubism or the Impressionists' diffused colour (in relation to objects this means either polarisation or valuation). Reality in her poems is undoubtedly ‘objective’, but this objectivity is illusory: while undergoing deformation, it does not in any sense turn into meta-reality, a reverie of the imagination; it does not cross boundaries drawn long ago by Horace in his ‘The Art of Poetry’:

Suppose some painter, as a tour de force,
Should couple head of man with neck of horse,
Invest them both with feathers, stead of hair,
And tack on limbs picked up from here and there,
So that the figure, when complete, should show
A maid above, a hideous fish below:
Should you be favoured with a private view,
You'd laugh, my friends […]

Szymborska's poetry sprang from the poetics of the poster. Posters are images with simplified interiors. For years she has been enriching her perception of the image, deepening her perception of things. Like the Old Masters, she has studied sketches and nature, spotting the ever-new complexities, discovering ever-new by-ways and possibilities of the visible. Until the image became an icon: that is, something which by its links with objective reality began to take on magical—or religious, in the pagan sense—characteristics. But it did not turn into a calligramme, a sign stretched between writing and the heavens, even though Szymborska does gravitate towards calligraphy. Is not the title-poem of her collection Ludzie na moście (People on a Bridge) evidence of this?

The image is her primary, basic and most natural form of expression; during the creative process it came to be questioned and subjected to revision, as in “Lot's Wife”, “Utopia” or “Medieval Miniature” in Wielka liczba (A Great Number). But the process actually began earlier in Szymborska's first important collection: in “Atlantis” and “A Midsummer Night's Dream” in Wolanie do Yeti (Calling out to Yeti). It wasn't the case that words began to be surprised by words or sentences by sentences, or that language itself, like a snake, began swallowing its own tail; it was rather that the image began to swallow the image.

This questioning of the image first began when a conviction arose that eyes are an illusory means of uncovering the truth; a revelation which had great formal consequences. The image is now subjected to an intellectual scrutiny and therefore distanced. Attitudes to it become cooler, less ecstatic—admittedly hers was never such in the fullest sense—more critical. They are saturated with irony, the duality of vision and of sight, they follow a zig-zagging course along which truth moves, with the dialectical ‘yes’ answered by the dialectical ‘no’. The poem becomes an object in the game of intellect and imagination; feelings are around to be played with cat-and-mouse, revealing their mild, though unavoidable disablement. Scepticism and relativism direct the imagination, whose tool becomes the “snake language”, as in the Icelandic Gunlaug's Saga.

The way language functions in Szymborska's work might be called semantic flirtation. The imagination never moves in a straight line, but rather ‘bi-laterally’, like the joystick of an aircraft. This corresponds to the movement of thought which in Szymborska's case simultaneously places under suspicion everything she says. Whatever the poet asserts is almost immediately called into question. Imagination is thus compelled to incessant mobility, incessant attack and defence, dualities of meaning are ‘forced’ out of her: mirrored, twinned, mutually matched non-Baudelairean “correspondences”. At every moment the poet seems to withdraw everything she has asserted. One can detect here both an intellectual quality and a spectacular exploitation by the poet of her femininity, fashioning from it a tool of both formal and epistemological inquisitiveness. It is in this extraordinary mobility—already noticeable at the level of ‘small’ images—that I would look for the fullest realisation of femininity in poetry: the idea of constant change as the most permanent characteristic of feminine nature.

Jerzy Kwiatkowski has already pointed out the malleability of this language. For each poem Szymborska creates a distinct linguistic code, employs different styles, depending on whichever she deems appropriate. But it is difficult to agree with Kwiatkowski when he claims that in Szymborska's work language therefore fulfils an ancillary or subordinate function, though not an utilitarian one. Although this may not seem obvious—due to an illusion created by formal perfection—in the case of a true poet language always performs a creative function and is the driving force. The a priori, both in relation to the object and to the intention, is the expression which orders the reality of the poem, though with such an excellent poet as Szymborska one is left with the impression that, precisely thanks to her stylistics, things are here very different from Rimbaud's case—which does not mean that I consider Rimbaud less perfect: he is quite simply unique. Here Szymborska is not alone. The arch-poet Adam Mickiewicz once dreamt of “a pliable language that would express everything the head thinks”. But mercifully he confined himself to dreaming; otherwise, would we have had his ‘Oda do młodości’ (‘Ode to Youth’) or Dziady (The Forefathers' Eve)? In any case, Mickiewicz amended his postulate; the formula of “fervent reason” in some sense defines an extreme possibility of the participation of the rational in poetic activity and cognition. After all, it was Plato—at once the greatest rationalist in human thought and the greatest dreamer—who claimed that “the gods speak through the mouths of poets”; in other words, the powers which transcend poets and which establish the Categorical Imperative of their language. Irrespective of whether the result of this Imperative is a seemingly objective description, speech pregnant with meanings or a narrative epic like The Illiad or Pan Tadeusz; or even a Rimbaudesque vision, an “illumination”: it amounts to a break-in both into the areas of cognition and into the mystery of fate.

Szymborska's poetry has many opponents. Particularly among poets. I understand their criticisms, but I don't share them. They say: Szymborska doesn't offer cognitive revelations—puzzlement as a cognitive category isn't enough. How mistaken this judgment is! By aiming at puzzlement, Szymborska aims at the very heart of poetry's cognitive energy, at the very source of its life. Indeed, it's from there, from that ‘small’ or ‘great’ puzzlement, that ‘everything’ comes—that first and last glimmer of cognition. It accompanies the birth of a child's language and therefore of its world; and it's there when a man closes his eyes in death: “So that's all? So nothing more? Now's the end?”—he asks himself; it is the last basis of his cognition. This is primary in poetry, and primary means both first—and thus, simplest; and last—thus, chief and fundamental.

Isn't this the source of poetic mastery: To give an original expression to one's own puzzlement? Not even posing questions: this is a secondary characteristic for a poet—though primary for a philosopher. And poetry is not philosophy. What separates it from simple philosophical schemes is language which sparkles, shines, lives, burns, freezes and never leaves one indifferent; which reanimates the dead structures of the image, fills it with living contents, empathetic puzzlement. Yet also from this perspective Szymborska is under fire: aren't questions indicative of philosophical puzzlement? The questions Szymborska raises concern existence rather than redemption. Historically speaking, one might say that her poetry concerns the ‘here’ rather than the ‘now’. Another reproach: Szymborska's poems are devoid of mystery, as if for her metaphysics didn't exist. Certainly, the author of Sto pociech (A Hundred Joys) and Wielka liczba isn't a metaphysician, and certainly not a mystic; that simply isn't her area. And if one is to categorise her in these terms, she is rather an epistemologist or a phenomenologist of revelation. Her patrons are Descartes and Pascal—and speaking of Pascal I don't have in mind his paradoxes of division but the sensation of sudden experience, of epiphanies. So, on the one hand, a rational, investigative, almost scientific relation to the object—this brings Szymborska close to the Age of Enlightenment, and also to the cognitive passions of the twentieth century: Ponge's dispassionate descriptions or the ideas of the French Nouveau Roman; and, on the other hand, Pascal with his celebration of cognition: “I am incompetent in truth and goodness” and: “Man is nothingness in the face of infinity, everything in the face of nothingness and a mediator between everything and nothing”. Both these assertions define to the same degree the cognitive scepticism of both Pascal and Szymborska, leading Pascal to a conception of the emotional nature of knowledge and the presence of mystical intuition; and Szymborska to the cognitive nature of emotions as a game of the intellect, a semantic flirtation whose meaning is primarily epistemological.

It is true, there is no mystery in her poems. At any rate, not in the sense that Pascal understood it: as the presence of mystical intuition. But this does not mean that their cognitive stratum has been reduced, that they are ‘ordinary’ or ‘obvious’. Only the concrete is ordinary, the object in which the poet is mirrored and discovers himself. And it is here that the Cartesianism of her imagination reveals itself—perhaps even of her poetic thinking. From its ‘centre’ the mind embraces everything: appears to highlight, to foreground and to cover all things. On the canvas of this ordinariness Szymborska builds her extra-ordinariness, her non-ordinariness, her strangeness. She shows from inside, from underneath, from below, from above, from the centre. From the side of nothingness too. It might be said that she realises in the highest sense William Blake's postulate in the opening lines of his ‘Auguries of Innocence’:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the Palm of your Hand
And Eternity in an Hour.

There is in Szymborska's poetry something which radiates authentic joy, as does the music of Mozart. A joy which issues from the sensation of a game of intellect and imagination; but above all, from the unaffectedness of her language. I stress: from unaffectedness, not naturalness; like every true artist, Szymborska is not natural. Art is artificial; this banal tautology fully conveys the basic condition of its existence, a condition apparently often overlooked today. The work she performs in the sphere of language is, as with all true masters, almost invisible, unostentatious. This work—this asceticism—has deepened in the last decade; the diction has become prosaic, as if the poet were trying to test whether, under the pressure of the commonplace, joy can pass the test of puzzlement and to what extent. Sometimes (as in “Pogrzeb” (“Funeral”)) in Ludzie na moście it seems that she has crossed the boundaries reserved for Miron Białoszewski, where once she steered rather towards the aphorisms of Stanisław Jerzy Lec.

Szymborska is one of the few contemporary poets who writes poems. That is, each of her poems is an autonomous world, a world in itself, and if someone wants to know her ‘as a whole’, complete, he can acquire such a comprehensive view from just a single poem, while other poets need a whole volume for self-definition. At the other extreme is Białoszewski, whose poems, with the exception of his first collection Obroty rzeczy (The Revolution of Things) seem mutually to complete and explicate each other, as though each poem is only understood fully through others. One could say that Białoszewski is a poet of a single linguistic gesture, which he expands, enriches and deepens; of one key, a key to the world, to reality. Whereas poets like Szymborska and Herbert call up such a key, which is different every time and every time exclusive to the world of the particular poem. In this sense Szymborska is traditional—or better, operates in the spirit of tradition, that is, of completeness, whereas Białoszewski functions in the spirit of modernity, that is, of specialisation and fragmentariness.