Wisława Szymborska and Event – a Poetic Thought

Abstract

The essay proposes an analysis of the poetic thought of the event in the work of the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska. In the face of a philosophical tradition marked by the forgetting of events, we see in the author's poetic unveiling an exemplary gesture that illuminates elementary traits of the event, which then reveals itself, as an irruption of novelty in the fabric of the real, especially through its contingent, unpredictable, irreversible, and particular nature. In order to investigate this hypothesis, we will examine the poem “Could Have” to uncover the poet’s elementary vocabulary, which is marked by the contrast between modal categories, the openness of meanings and its own paradoxical logic; we will then observe its uses in “Event”, a poem in which the astonishment characteristic of Szymborska’s poetic narratives opens up to an experience of thought and language with the nature of events.