The Glory Hidden in a Grain of Sand

On December 10, 1996, in Stockholm's Concert Hall, the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska received the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy honored her for poetry of "ironic precision" — but what made her work extraordinary was where she aimed that precision. Szymborska wrote about onions, grains of sand, cats in empty apartments, stones on the roadside. She took the things everyone else walked past and held them up to the light until they shimmered with meaning.…