Universal Dimension

Much of east European poetry Polish, Czech, Hungarian, above all, Russian - is the language of a `country' where genocide has been perpetuated on a mass scale. Two World Wars, 22 million and more liquidated in the Gulag, Nazi atrocities and the Holocaust - the figures simply boggle the imagination. So the linkage between the word and historical experiences have to be close indeed, though of course, there is no simple relationship between cause and effect. All the same it does explain why there is no fundamental split between poetry and politics, unlike in the west where the twain rarely meet. In western Europe and the US, poets react to the cosy, domesticated, senselessly sensible way of life in a mass democracy by asserting the precariousness of things and deliberately exploring the realm of breakdown and madness; in eastern Europe, all this is on the outside, the products of war and totalitarianism. Wistawa Szymborska who got the Nobel Prize in 1996 is no exception to the traits of east European, especially Polish tradition, as revealed in her Poems: New and Collected 1957-1997 ( Faber,