Life & Wisdom Quote by Wislawa Szymborska

Szymborska slips the compliment in through a side door, where it can’t get too comfortable. The opening clause is a small act of sabotage: “Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration” punctures the romantic myth that poets have exclusive access to the divine switchboard. It’s a move typical of her sensibility: demystify first, then let wonder back in on stricter terms. Inspiration, she implies, is not a gated estate; it’s a public utility that visits scientists, lovers, clerks, and children. Poets don’t own it.

And yet she can’t resist granting them special status anyway, but in a way that stays allergic to grandiosity. “A select group” carries a whiff of exclusivity, but it’s immediately outsourced to caprice: “Fortune’s darlings.” Not genius, not merit, not destiny with a capital D - Fortune, fickle and unearned. The subtext is deliciously double-edged: poets are lucky, yes, but luck is not a credential. They’re “darlings” in the way a favored pet is - indulged, not necessarily important.

That tension mirrors Szymborska’s larger project as a poet writing in the long shadow of ideology and historical catastrophe: distrust the self-mythologizing voice; keep the ego small enough to survive reality. She offers poetry a defense that doesn’t rely on priestly authority. Poets aren’t prophets. They’re the ones who, by some accident of temperament and timing, get handed the strange privilege of noticing - and of turning that noticing into language others can borrow.