school, where, she posits, you are required to like
it. The irony in this line concerns the students
who do, in reality, like poetry, regardless of the
requirement that they study it; one might expect
that the poet would not wish to discount any
people who legitimately like poetry in her assess-
ment. Poets are also eliminated from Szymbor-
ska’s calculations, with the assumption being
that they certainly must like poetry as practi-
tioners of the art form. It is also ironic that
Szymborska admits that such a small amount
of people may actually like the art form she is
currently engaged in creating.
The critic Ewa Gajer, in a 1997 article for the
journalHecate, discusses Szymborska’s use of
irony in ‘‘Some People Like Poetry.’’ Gajer spe-
cifically points to Szymborska’s emphasis on the
word ‘‘like’’ and to the way the poet questions the
way the word is used regarding one’s feelings
about poetry. The irony in this second stanza is
that Szymborska compares the appreciation of a
complex literary creation—a poem—to the sim-
pler enjoyment one derives from eating soup or
petting a dog, for example. Gajer observes that
this same ironic attitude is employed by Szym-
borska in a large number of her poems, partic-
ularly in those in which she offers fresh responses
to old problems. This, it may be argued, is pre-
cisely what Szymborska is attempting to do in
‘‘Some People Like Poetry’’—to use irony in an
effort to provide a new answer to the old ques-
tion of what poetry truly is.
HISTORICAL CONTEXTCommunist and Post-Communist Poland
Szymborska began writing poetry for publica-
tion at the end of World War II, but just as she
had finished crafting her first volume of poems,
the harsh realities of being an artist in Stalinist
Poland became apparent. During the war,
Poland was a battleground between Nazi Ger-
many and the Soviet Union. By the war’s end,
the Soviets, under the leadership of Joseph Sta-
lin, had driven out the Nazis and had taken
control of Poland. According to Edward Hirsch
in his 1999 bookResponsive Reading, Szymbor-
ska had her first volume of poetry slated for
publication in 1949. During that year, Hirsch
explains, the mandate of socialist realism was
imposed on writers and artists by Soviet decree.
Due to Szymborska’s volume’s focus on the war,
it was deemed unpublishable, as it did nothing to
glorify the Communist party. Such strict Stalinist
censorship began to be loosened in 1956. That
year in Poland, mass demonstrations against the
Communist system of government occurred in the
city of Poznan ́. Around this time, Nikita Khrush-
chev (who had assumed the role of First Secretary
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in
1953 following the death of Stalin) denounced the
Stalinist practices of the Soviet Communist Party.
Szymborska was now free to publish poetry that
served her own purposes, rather than serving the
propagandist purposes of the Communist Party.
Some censorship remained, but in general, works
that did not overtly criticize the government were
allowed to be published.
As the decades passed, despite brief periods
of stability and economic growth, Poles grew
increasingly discontent with their Communist
overseers. During the 1980s, massive labor strikes
resulted in the establishment of trade unions. With
workers consolidating their power, the Commu-
nist leadership began to grow fearful of increas-
ingly strident opposition to their rule. Martial law
was imposed, and the 1980s were known as a
decade of economic crisis in Poland. Szymborska,
like other writers at this time, published her work
in an exile periodical produced in Paris. It is within
this framework that her later work must be under-
stood. Under the leadership of Mikhail Gorba-
chev (who served as the last General Secretary of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, from
1985 through 1991), the Soviet Communist Party
allowed semifree elections during the final years of
the 1980s, and by 1989, Poland had elected its own
government, thereby ending Communist rule in
Poland. It was under these stressful economic
and political circumstances that Szymborska rose
to literary prominence in her own country and
around the world. When Szymborska wrote
‘‘SomePeopleLikePoetry’’in1993,thefirstfreely
elected parliament had just served its full term,
and the nation’s second round of elections was
taking place. Also at this time, the last of the
Soviet troops had finally exited Poland. It was a
time of optimism as well as reflection. Such vary-
ing viewpoints are expressed in the poetry Szym-
borska wrote in the early 1990s. Some of the
poems in the volume in which ‘‘Some People
Like Poetry’’ is included,Koniec i pocza,tek(The
End and the Beginning), have dark themes and
reflect the deep pain endured by the Poles for
many years, while others focus on simple everydaySome People Like Poetry