Some People Like Poetry
Originally published in Polish as ‘‘Niektorzy lubia
poezje’’ in the volumeKoniec i poczatek(1993; the
title translates to ‘‘The End and the Beginning’’
but was not published in English translation),
‘‘Some People Like Poetry’’ is a short poem in
which the poet, Szymborska, explores the ques-
tion of the nature and purpose of verse. The title
is sometimes translated as ‘‘Some Like Poetry.’’ A
Polish poet who witnessed and survived the
Nazi invasion of Poland in World War II and
the subsequent Communist takeover of her coun-
try, Szymborska’s poetry addresses the weighty
themes of war as well as simple everyday experi-
ences. Her work began being extensively trans-
lated into English following her winning of the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. ‘‘Some People
Like Poetry’’ is included in the 1998 collection
Poems: New and Collected, 1957–1997,translated
from the Polish by Stanisl⁄aw Baran ́czak and
Clare Cavanagh.
Within the three apparently straightforward
stanzas of ‘‘Some People Like Poetry,’’ Szymbor-
ska comments on each of the words in her title,
investigating the greater complexity of the indi-
vidual ideas. She questions which and how many
people actually like poetry, contemplates the
notion of what it means to truly ‘‘like’’ some-
thing, and then, in the final stanza, poses the
enormous question of what poetry is. Not often
treated individually by critics in assessments of
Szymborska’s body of work, the little poem is
exemplary in many ways of her ambiguous style,256
WISL⁄AWA SZYMBORSKA
1993