Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, 88

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

The Nobel award committee's 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. While she was arguably the most popular poet in Poland, most of the world had not heard of her before she won the Nobel Prize.

She has been called both deeply political and playful, a poet who used humor in unforeseen ways. Her verse, seemingly simple, 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 wandering in an empty apartment, an old fan in a museum -- to reflect on grand topics such as love, death and passing time.

Szymborska published her first poem in 1945, and quickly became a fixture of Krakow's postwar literary circles, which initially accepted Soviet-imposed ideology in art and literature.

She joined the communist party in 1952. But like many Polish writers and artists, Szymborska grew disillusioned with communism. She officially broke with the party in 1966.

Szymborska published some 20 volumes of poetry in all -- one every four or five years -- a handful of which have been translated into over a dozen languages. Her poetry was wildly popular with her Polish readers, who snapped up each volume upon release.

Yet the shy poet fiercely clung to her privacy, and lived a quiet life in her beloved Krakow. She reluctantly faced the limelight that accompanies the Nobel Prize, and the corresponding lecture in front of 1,800 people was a heavy burden for a woman who had said she's comfortable only in groups of up to a dozen.