Wislawa Szymborska - Telegraph In Poland, the readership for her wry, provocative work had already reached far beyond the small circles of dedicated poetry readers when she won the award. Even so, she would regularly poke fun at how irrelevant poetry could seem to a community. In one account of a poetry reading she explains that people arrive only because it is raining, and describes the dream a man has of his late wife as he snoozes as the best thing that happens. The whole performance is punctuated with the forlorn refrain, "O Muse." Inevitably, when she became famous, journalists outside her homeland were left trying to explain who on earth she was (which prompted, as the announcement was made, her friend Seamus Heaney to exclaim: "Poor Wislawa!"). The answers were predictable: she was a recluse, we learnt, and an Italian newspaper called her "the Greta Garbo of World Poetry." It is true that she profited from her own company, but the idea of an austere woman batting out the world does not tell much of the story; it is perhaps more helpful to think of the film Ninotchka, in which Garbo laughed. Szymborska went through the same kind of transformation, from the worthy poet paying lip-service to the Communist regime of the People's Republic to someone who, after the death of Stalin, was freer to laugh, sometimes to mock, and to embrace the wonder of life. Two sorts of that wonder elevate her work: one is the constant call of "I don't know" which, as she argued in her Nobel Prize speech, explains how humanity ever made any progress. But more dominant was the wonder at the beauty of the world and its civilisation. Even when she was railing at Stalin's legacy, she was invoking the pleasures that were suppressed behind the Iron Curtain. She imagines the dictator as a yeti in his remote Himalayan world, and tells him "Yeti, we've got Shakespeare there. / Yeti, we play solitaire / and violin. At nightfall, we turn lights on, Yeti. Even when confronting the wars that had all but destroyed Poland, she could salvage some optimism; and if that were ever impossible, then she managed to conclude that "Sadness is a beautiful category." Wislawa Szymborska was born on July 2 1923 in Pnin, near Poznan. In 1931 the family moved to Krakow, where she was educated. In 1943 she became a railway official, so managing to avoid deportation and forced labour under the Nazis. After the war she continued her education, studying Polish Philology, and later Sociology, at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Her academic interests were seldom far from her poetry, informed as it was by evolution, anthropology, palaeontology, mathematics and epistemology. It was at this time that she met Czeslaw Milosz, the poet who was to win the Nobel Prize in 1980; they became friends, and his own spare and frank poetry would have a strong influence on her. He later praised her work as "post-Copernican, post-Newtonian, post-Darwinian, post-two-World Wars, post crimes-and-inventions of the 20th century." In 1949 Szymborska wrote a volume of poetry that was censured for being at odds with the prevailing dogmas, and for a while she did managed to adopt the "right" sort of Socialist Realism. Her 1952 collection, That Is What We Are Living For, contains poetry praising Lenin, and also an industrial town springing up near Krakow. In 1954 she won the city's prize for literature. But it was Calling Out to the Yeti that was to become her magnum opus. Her distinctive voice was already clear. She dismissed the idea that any experience could be ordinary, and managed to find something transcendent even in classified advertisements. Soon she would be making poetry out of grammar exercises and the endless digits of pi. A poem about chance meetings, and their spiralling consequences, Love at First Sight, was an influence on Kieslowski's film Three Colours: Red. Szymborska enhanced her reputation for seeing things from unexpected angles by her work on the Polish literary magazine, Literary Life. Her job was to produce book reviews, which she did not feel equipped to do and so took every opportunity to write subjectively, and not just about the book. Of Kathleen Keating's The Little Book of Hugs, she wrote: "We all know that a gesture repeated too often grows trite and loses its deeper meaning. Miss Keating is an American, and enthusiasm comes to her more easily. These reviews were collected in a volume called Non-Required Reading. Still she took the role of poet seriously, and in her speech on accepting the Nobel Prize, asked why people were reluctant to name "poetry" as their profession. Her life was not a solitary one. In 1948 she married the poet Adam Wlodek; although the couple divorced in 1954, they remained friends until his death in 1986. Her subsequent companion, the writer Kornel Filipowicz, died in 1990. She left no children, and an epitaph she wrote for herself showed her to be characteristically modest about her own legacy: "The plain grave? There's poetic justice in it ... / Passerby, take your PC out, press "POWER," / think on Szymborska's fate for half a minute." She died in her sleep - an end that she had anticipated in a poem published 54 years earlier: "Death? It comes in your sleep, / exactly as it should. // When it comes, you'll be dreaming / that you don't need to breathe ... you'd feel more terror at the sound / of petals falling to the ground. Wislawa Szymborska, born July 2 1923, died February 1 2012