Popular since the late 1950s in her native Poland, Szymborska was little known elsewhere until the Nobel Prize announcement. Her quiet, personal poems—when compared to the political rebellion of many other poets from Eastern Europe—seemed out of step with the times. Never a prolific writer—she has published some 200 poems in a career spanning 40 years—Szymborska has not created the body of work normally associated with a Nobel Prize-winner. But, as Bogdana Carpenter remarked in World Literature Today, each of her poems "is a masterpiece."

Source: Gale in Context: Contemporary Women Poets