Wislawa Szymborska | Polish poet, 88

Wislawa Szymborska, 88, Poland's 1996 Nobel Prize-winning poet whose simple words and playful verse plucked threads of irony and empathy out of life, died Wednesday of lung cancer at her home in the southern city of Krakow.

The Nobel citation called her the "Mozart of poetry," a woman who mixed the elegance of language with "the fury of Beethoven" and tackled serious subjects with humor. Most of the world had not heard of the soft-spoken Ms. Szymborska before she won the Nobel Prize.

Her verse was subtle, deep, and often hauntingly beautiful. She used simple objects and detailed observation to reflect on larger truths, often using everyday images - an onion, a cat in an empty apartment - to reflect on grand topics.

She was born in the village of Bnin in western Poland. Eight years later she moved with her parents to Krakow, and developed deep ties to the medieval city, with its artistic and intellectual milieu. She lived there until her death. After the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, she found work as a rail clerk to avoid deportation to Germany as a forced laborer. In her free time, she studied at underground universities.

She resumed her formal studies after the war in Polish literature and sociology at Krakow's Jagiellonian University, but never earned a degree. In 1945, she published her first poem, "I Am Looking for a Word," in a weekly supplement to a local newspaper.

Not long after, she wed poet Adam Wlodek. Although the two divorced after a few years, they remained close friends until Wlodek's death in 1986.

She quickly became a fixture of the city's postwar literary circles, which initially accepted Soviet-imposed ideology in art and literature, and she joined the communist party in 1952.

She eventually grew disillusioned with communism and later renounced her Stalin-era verse. She officially broke with the party in 1966. .

She published about 20 volumes of poetry - one every four or five years - a handful of which have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Works available in English include View With a Grain of Sand, People on a Bridge, and Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts: Seventy Poems. - AP