Zbigniew Herbert (1924 - 1998), poet, essayist, and dramatist for theater and radio, was born in Lwow, and got most of his secondary and university education through the underground courses that had already become a practiced Polish tradition a century before the Nazi takeover. Serving in the underground Home Army, he later studied art and philosophy and received degrees in economics and law. Though a few poems appeared in 1950, he managed to wait out the Stalinist period of obligatory "socialist realism" before contributing to the highly respected semi-independent weekly, Tygodnik Powszechny, and to domestic and émigré literary monthlies.

Only after the thaw of 1956 was his first book of poems published, and he began traveling widely, with a one-year visiting professorship in Los Angeles in 1970-71. In 1975 he signed a major open letter protesting ominous changes to the Polish Constitution, which led to additional longer sojourns abroad. During the first Solidarity period in 1981 he joined the editorial board of the literary journal Zapis ("Censored"), co-founded in 1976 by Adam Zagajewski and others as a clandestine venue for works banned by the Communist authorities.

Herbert is a metaphysical poet who questions the meaning of existence in the face of totalitarianism, violence, the cynical march of history, and death, but takes -- and offers -- comfort in the broader context of a history that embraces such reassuring constants as Socrates and Marcus Aurelius. Herbert has a genius for blending pathos with irony, for presenting great metaphors through the poetry of everyday speech.

A writer also of plays, and of many essays on the Mediterranean roots of European culture, Herbert is perhaps most widely associated with his book of poems called Mr. Cogito and subsequent collections that frequently feature this heir of the Enlightenment, a quintessentially critical, rational person, who struggles to address problems of our times only to realize that they do not easily lend themselves to rational solutions. Report from the Besieged City, a collection published clandestinely in 1983, struck an exceptionally deep chord among Poles under martial law following the crackdown on Solidarity. One of its poems, incidentally, The Monster of Mr. Cogito, which evokes an enemy that is foggy, suffocating, ill-defined, and thus hard to fight, was discovered by admirers of Herbert in New York City, in the days following September 11, to have an uncanny relevance, though written 20 years earlier, to invisible terrorists and the pall over Ground Zero.

Wislawa Szymborska (b.1923), poet, translator, editor, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996, "for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality." Immediately following the war, Szymborska studied sociology and Polish literature at Jagiellonian University in Cracow, then worked as an editor for many years at literary periodicals. Two books of her poems came out in the early 50s in which she had attempted to satisfy the requirements of socialist realism and which she now disclaims. Her real debut, in her own authentic voice, was a book of poems in 1957, Calling Out to Yeti, the fruit of a basic re-evaluation of her artistic and philosophical views, a book that shaped her creative work from then on, and a key influence in the renewal of Polish poetry following the political thaw of 1956. Works that enhanced her stature and popularity in the 60s include Salt and A Hundred Consolations. As a nationally celebrated poet she signed the letter of protest against changes to the Constitution proposed in 1975, and in 1978 she openly helped organize an oppositionist program of unauthorized academic studies.

Her poetry addresses in a very personal tone a sense of anxiety, uncertainty, and wonder, a condition of modernity that she shares with her readers. Even if the questions she poses are complex and difficult to deal with, her writing is deceptively simple and lucid, using as a vehicle the short form of the epigram, or personal note -- or conversation, often with objects, or with non-organic matter from other worlds. Her use of paradoxical thinking, self-irony, humor, candor, and meticulous observation of immediate reality, invites the reader to transcend that reality, along with the poet, thus taking part in an exchange and in the experience of other "possible worlds". Her choice of words is so precise, so playful even when serious, and her mastery of the whole panoply of sophisticated word-play so assured, and yet so free of mannerism, that the Nobel Committee described her as "the Mozart of poetry". Despite the challenges presented by her verbal precision, her poems have appeared in some forty languages.

Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), poet, essayist, translator, and literary historian, won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature, as a writer "who with uncompromising clear-sightedness voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts". His work has been accurately characterized as "one of the monumental splendors of poetry in our age," (Edward Hirsch, The New York Times Book Review).

Milosz was born of Polish parents in the multi-ethnic world of Lithuania in 1911, and was raised and educated in Vilnius. Counting himself among the last of the Polish Lithuanians, he recalls, "We were something else, Lithuanians, but not in the accepted twentieth-century sense, which says that to be a Lithuanian you have to speak Lithuanian". While studying for his law degree he already began to get recognition for his poems. He was working for Polish Radio in Warsaw when the Germans invaded, then wrote and edited for resistance publications that proliferated in risky defiance of the occupier.

After the war Milosz entered the diplomatic service, first as cultural attaché in New York and Washington, and then in Paris, where, following the suppression of Poland's coalition government in 1951, he asked for asylum. In Paris he was vilified by most French intellectuals (who saw Communism and Stalin as the hope of the future) for breaking with the Communist regime, and was regarded coolly by many earlier Polish émigrés for having served it. In part to keep his sanity he wrote The Captive Mind (1953), his brilliant study of the "mental acrobatics" of Polish writers who chose to conform to Stalinist dogmas. During his ten years in Paris Milosz won renown throughout Europe for translated editions of his poetry, novels, and essays, which were banned in Poland. In 1960 Milosz accepted a position as a visiting lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley, and became a full professor there in 1961, and for the next twenty years combined his writing with teaching courses on subjects ranging from Dostoevsky to Manicheanism. Yet in Cold-War America The Captive Mind remained his only well-known work until 1973, when a volume of Milosz's poetry was published in English for the first time, finally sparking his renown in the English-speaking world as a poet and not just a political essayist.

As a Nobel Laureate Milosz returned to Poland in the summer of 1981 for the first time in 30 years -- to a country spiritually liberated by the Solidarity movement -- and he was welcomed as a national hero. Publication of his banned books resumed, but was again forbidden with the imposition of martial law that December.

"Milosz has the indomitable strength of the committed writer, urgently pouring out, for the past seventy years, works too numerous, and too complex, to be grasped in their entirety by any single reader's mind." (Helen Vendler, New York Review of Books)

"He is among those members of humankind who have had the ambiguous privilege of knowing and standing far more reality than the rest of us." - Seamus Heaney

Adam Zagajewski (b.1945). After completing his studies in psychology and philosophy, Zagajewski in the late 60s and early 70s wrote for several counter-cultural student papers and underground periodicals. He had already become recognized as a major figure in Polish poetry's "New Wave", exposing among other things the corrupted use of language by officialdom, when he joined other writers and intellectuals in signing a protest letter against changes to the Constitution proposed in 1975. Consequently forbidden to publish, he joined the founders of a clandestine periodical called Zapis (meaning "censored"), which specialized in publishing precisely what had been banned by the censors. After the imposition of martial law in 1981, Zagajewski emigrated to Paris, where he co-edits a highly respected Polish-language literary journal, Literary Notebooks. Since 1988, he spends every spring semester as a Visiting Associate Professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, where he teaches graduate classes in poetry and literature.

Zagajewski's widely honored poetry is now extremely popular on university campuses throughout Europe and North America. When the poetry editor of The New Yorker was asked to select a poem for the back page of the issue that followed the Sept.11 attacks (with its black-on-black cover), she had no hesitation in choosing (though written two years earlier) Zagajewski's Try to Praise the Mutilated World. 

What Zagajewski hopes his readers will do is "to experience astonishment and to stop still in that astonishment for a long moment or two." Of Zagajewski, the late Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky once said, "Seldom has the muse spoken to anyone with such clarity and urgency."