From The Guardian:
Polish poet and Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska, whose beguilingly simple, playful poems spoke to the heart of everyday life, died yesterday aged 88.
Described by the Nobel committee as the “Mozart of poetry” but with “something of the fury of Beethoven” – and by an Italian newspaper as the “Greta Garbo of World Poetry” – Szymborska died in her sleep from lung cancer, said her personal secretary Michal Rusinek.
Speaking on Wednesday, Poland’s president Bronislaw Komorowski called her the country’s “guardian spirit”. Her poems “were brilliant advice, through which the world became more understandable”, he said; they showed the importance of finding value “??in the daily bustle”.
Szymborska remained popular after her 1996 Nobel, but she stayed away from the limelight:
“For the last few years my favourite phrase has been ‘I don’t know’. I’ve reached the age of self-knowledge, so I don’t know anything. People who claim that they know something are responsible for most of the fuss in the world.”