I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again. – Wislawa Szymborska
I have sympathy for young people, for their growing pains, but I balk when these growing pains are pushed into the foreground, when you make these young people the only vehicles of lifes wisdom. – Wislawa Szymborska
Poetic talent doesnt operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry. – Wislawa Szymborska
I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it. – Wislawa Szymborska
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. – T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919