Artistic Expression In Wisława Szymborska's Poetry

Artistic expression is the creative manifestation of an artist’s thoughts and feelings. Wisława Szymborska’s poetry states much about what artistic expression is, and how to qualify, and value it, and the importance of breaking from restriction in terms of how critics, whether self-critics or otherwise, evaluate creative expression itself. In The Joy of Writing, she explores the act of writing itself and the power and freedom of artistic expression. Evaluation of an Unwritten Poem is a satire of a critic’s review of a poem. Szymborska demonstrates the fallacies and absurdities associated with judging the quality, cause and meaning of artistic expression, such as poetry. In the poems, Szymborska’s stance towards objective artistic judgement is that it is absurd and comical, due to the imprecise and subjective nature of poetry.

In The Joy of Writing, Szymborska creates a “written doe” that wanders through the “written woods”. She repeatedly questions every action of this doe in the first stanza, attempting to find the purpose of her own creation, however is unable to do so, asking “Why does she lift her head[...]?”. The doe becomes a metaphor for the meaning of poetry, and how the creator herself finds it difficult to discern its cause and purpose. In the third stanza, the “hunters” attempt to hunt this doe;” in other words metaphorically trying to find the meaning in the poem, and hence represent the critics- both the external and internal critic. The hunters are described as having “squinting eyes behind their sights”, the verb “squinting” suggesting how the hunters are not only unable to see clearly, but also, they are trying too hard to see properly. It is as if the hunters or the critics are so fixated in finding the meaning of the poem that they threaten to kill the doe- thus destroying the beauty and meaning of the