Zbigniew Herbert, (born October 29, 1924, Lwów, Poland [now Lviv, Ukraine]—died July 28, 1998, Warsaw), one of the leading Polish poets of the post-World War II generation. Herbert attended an underground high school during the wartime German occupation of Poland and also took secret military training courses with the Polish Home Army. After World War II he earned degrees in economics, law, and philosophy at various universities in Poland. He published little poetry in 1949–54, when Socialist Realism was mandatory in Poland, but in 1955 he began a long association with the literary review Twórczość (“Creation”). Herbert’s first collection of
