(24 December 1798 – 26 November 1855) was a Polish poet, dramatist, essayist, publicist, translator, professor of Slavic literature, and political activist. He is regarded as national poet in Poland, Lithuania and Belarus. A principal figure in Polish Romanticism, he is counted one of Poland's "Three Bards" ("Trzej Wieszcze")and is widely regarded as Poland's greatest poet. He is also considered one of the greatest Slavic and European poets and has been dubbed a "Slavic bard".A leading Romantic dramatist, he has been compared in Poland and Europe to Byron and Goethe. He is known chiefly for the poetic drama Dziady (Forefathers' Eve) and the national epic poem Pan Tadeusz. His other influential works include Konrad Wallenrod and Grażyna. All these served as inspiration for uprisings against the three imperial powers that had partitioned the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth out of existence.

4 September 1809 – 3 April 1849) was a Polish Romantic poet. He is considered one of the "Three Bards" of Polish literature — a major figure in the Polish Romantic period, and the father of modern Polish drama. His works often feature elements of Slavic pagan traditions, Polish history, mysticism and orientalism. His style includes the employment of neologisms and irony. His primary genre was the drama, but he also wrote lyric poetry. His most popular works include the dramas Kordian and Balladyna and the poems Beniowski and Testament mój. Słowacki spent his youth in the "Stolen Lands", in Kremenets and Vilnius. He briefly worked for the government of the Kingdom of Poland. During the November 1830 Uprising, he was a courier for the Polish revolutionary government. When the uprising ended in defeat, he found himself abroad and thereafter, like many compatriots, lived the life of an émigré.

20 August 1847 – 19 May 1912, is a leading figure in the history of Polish literature and a distinctive voice in world literature As a 15-year-old he joined the Polish 1863 Uprising against Imperial Russia. Shortly after his 16th birthday, he suffered severe battle injuries. Five months later he was imprisoned for his part in the Uprising. In 1872 at age 25, in Warsaw, he settled into a 40-year journalistic career that highlighted science, technology, education, and economic and cultural development. These societal enterprises were essential to the endurance of a people that had in the 18th century been partitioned out of political existence by Russia, Prussia and Austria. Głowacki took his pen name "Prus" from the appellation of his family's coat-of-arms. As a sideline he wrote short stories. Succeeding with these, he went on to employ a larger canvas; over the decade between 1884 and 1895, he completed four major novels: The Outpost, The Doll, and Pharaoh. The Doll depicts the romantic infatuation of a man of action who is frustrated by his country's backwardness. Pharaoh, Prus' only historical novel, is a study of political power and of the fates of nations, set in ancient Egypt.

(15 January 1869 – 28 November 1907) was a Polish playwright, painter and poet, as well as interior and furniture designer. A patriotic writer, he created a series of symbolic, national dramas within the artistic philosophy of the Young Poland Movement. Wyspiański was one of the most outstanding and multifaceted artists of his time in Poland under the foreign partitions. He successfully joined the trends of modernism with themes of the Polish folk tradition and Romantic history. He wrote: The Wedding, Legion, The Curse.

S.Ż. (14 October 1864 – 20 November 1925) was a Polish novelist and dramatist. He was called the "conscience of Polish literature". He wrote Seedtime, The Labors of Sisyphus, Homeless People. Those books are realistic books about Poland and Poles in his times. W.R. (May 7, 1867 – December 5, 1925) was a Polish novelist and the 1924 laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature. His best-known work is the award-winning four-volume novel Chłopi (The Peasants). He also wrote At work, Justly. Reymont is the best example of realism in Poland.

January 22, 1921 – August 4, 1944) was a Polish poet and Home Army soldier, one of the most renowned authors of the Generation of Columbuses, the young generation of Polish poets of whom many perished in the Warsaw Uprising.

W. Sz.- (2 July 1923 – 1 February 2012) was a Polish poet, essayist, translator and recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. She was described as a "Mozart of Poetry". In Poland, Szymborska's books have reached sales rivaling prominent prose authors: although she once remarked in a poem, "Some Like Poetry“, that no more than two out of a thousand people care for the art. Szymborska was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature "for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality" C. M. – (30 June 1911 – 14 August 2004) was a Polish poet, prose writer, translator.His World War II-era sequence, The World, is a collection of twenty naive poems. Following the war, he served as Polish cultural attaché in Paris and Washington, D.C., then in 1951 defected to the West. His nonfiction book, The Captive Mind (1953), became a classic of anti-Stalinism. From 1961 to 1998 he was a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1980 the Nobel Prize in Literature. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, he divided his time between Berkeley, California, and Kraków, Poland.