Nobel poets

http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/02/2...ls/heaney.html Seamus Heaney reciting poems, 2002

"Like Sebald later on, Canetti might have found Britain a suitable context for pulling off the trick of becoming a famous name without very many people knowing precisely who he was. Canetti even got the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature, and people still didn't know who he was. He was a Spanish Jewish Viennese Swiss Bulgarian refugee with an impressively virile mustache; he was Iris Murdoch's lover; he was a mystery. Apart from a sociological treatise called "Crowds and Power," which advanced a thesis no more gripping than its title, his solitary prewar novel, "Die Blendung," known in English as "Auto-da-Fé," was the only book by Canetti that anybody had ever heard of. Almost no one had read it, but everybody meant to. Those who had read it said it was about a mysterious man in a house full of books, and that the house, in a symbolic enactment of the collapse of a civilization, fell down, or almost did, or creaked a lot, or something". ...from Party in the Blitz (a review in the NYtimes) by Elias Canetti
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/l...981/press.html

Time is endless in thy hands, my lord.
There is none to count thy minutes.
Days and nights pass and ages bloom and fade like flowers. Thou knowest how to wait.
Thy centuries follow each other perfecting a small wild flower.
We have no time to lose, and having no time, we must scramble for our chances. We are too poor to be late.
And thus it is that time goes try, while I give it to every querulous man who claims it, and thine altar is empty of all offerings to the last.
At the end of the day I hasten in fear lest thy gate be shut; but if I find that yet there is time.

(Gitanjali, 82.) Rabindranath Tagore, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1913. This work added to the end of the presentation.

Clenched Soul


We have lost even this twilight.
No one saw us this evening hand in hand
while the blue night dropped on the world.

I have seen from my window
the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.

Sometimes a piece of sun
burned like a coin in my hand.

I remembered you with my soul clenched
in that sadness of mine that you know.

Where were you then?
Who else was there?
Saying what?
Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly
when I am sad and feel you are far away?


Pablo Neruda (excerpt from Clenched Soul)

With a common and blue collar beginning taking jobs like stonecutter and ticket taker, in his younger life he founded (during a strike) a literary magazine called "Our Present Day" and subsequently joined a society of future writers called "The Green Ones", he kept hard working jobs while he kept writing. After many years, writing all along, and getting published now and then, he started writing what would be his master works. In 1974, he shared the Nobel Prize for Literature with Eyvind Johnson. This sample, the last stanza of"The Inner Light", clearly shows his genious...

...........THE INNER LIGHT

It was like a play of fans
in keeping with the same law that holds for rainbows,
but with spread and folded fans
alternating with one another
in keeping with the law of light inscribed in them.
It was the light when it dances enclosed
when it is not traveling abroad and seen.
It belongs to the nature of light
that it can be shut in
and still not die out in its movement
that it preserves itself thus in the darkness
as thought, intent and aptitude,
that it remembers its changes
and performs its dance, its interplay.
With this art the light keeps together
the innumerable swarms of matter
and sings with light's spectral wings
the endless song in honor of the fullness of the world.

by Harry Martinson

Won the Nobel in 1996....excerpt translated from Polish...... THE JOY OF WRITING
Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence - this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word "woods."

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they'll never let her get away.

"The true Vedantic spirit does not start out with a system of preconceived ideas. It possesses absolute liberty and unrivalled courage among religions with regard to the facts to be observed and the diverse hypotheses it has laid down for their coordination. Never having been hampered by a priestly order, each man has been entirely free to search wherever he pleased for the spiritual explanation of the spectacle of the universe."

- Romain Rolland From: Life of Vivekananda






"The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain - but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by the various essences, until it becomes a vast conflagration leaping from forest to forest."

-Romain Rolland (1866-1944) ...Although he is listed as a poet of the 19th century, it must be his prose which is the poetry. He won the Nobel in 1915.

When Earth's Last Picture Is Painted

When Earth's last picture is painted
And the tubes are twisted and dried
When the oldest colors have faded
And the youngest critic has died
We shall rest, and faith, we shall need it
Lie down for an aeon or two
'Till the Master of all good workmen
Shall put us to work anew
And those that were good shall be happy
They'll sit in a golden chair
They'll splash at a ten league canvas
With brushes of comet's hair
They'll find real saints to draw from
Magdalene, Peter, and Paul
They'll work for an age at a sitting
And never be tired at all.
And only the Master shall praise us.
And only the Master shall blame.
And no one will work for the money.
No one will work for the fame.
But each for the joy of the working,
And each, in his separate star,
Will draw the thing as he sees it.
For the God of things as they are!





By: Rudyard Kipling (won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907)

"Gabriela's poetry possesses the merit of consummate originality, of a voice of its own, authentic and consciously realized. The affirmation within this poetry of the intimate "I" removed from everything foreign to it, makes it profoundly human, and it is this human quality that gives it its universal value."

- Margot Arce de Vazquez

THE SHINING HOST


In vain you try

To smother my song:

A million children

In chorus sing it

Beneath the sun!


(first stanza)




- Gabriela Mistral (Nobel, 1945)

GROWLTIGER'S LAST STAND
GROWLTIGER was a Bravo Cat, who lived upon a barge;
In fact he was the roughest cat that ever roamed at large.
From Gravesend up to Oxford he pursued his evil aims,
Rejoicing in his title of "The Terror of the Thames."

His manners and appearance did not calculate to please;
His coat was torn and seedy, he was baggy at the knees;
One ear was somewhat missing, no need to tell you why,
And he scowled upon a hostile world from one forbidding eye.

The cottagers of Rotherhithe knew something of his fame,
At Hammersmith and Putney people shuddered at his name.
They would fortify the hen-house, lock up the silly goose,
When the rumour ran along the shore: GROWLTIGER'S ON THE LOOSE!

.......
(first stanzas) by T.S.Eliot ...won Nobel in 1948

The Academy's Description {Nobel Prize Academy}


In its announcement, the academy described the poet in these terms:



- Mr. Seifert has never become a writer with a Party program. The state is there for the people and not vice versa. There is an element of anarchy in his philosophy of life - a protest against everything that cuts down life's possibilities and reduces human beings to cogs in some ideological machine or yokes them to the harness of some dogma.



- His method is to depict and praise those aspects of life and the world that are not governed by dogmas and dictates, political or otherwise. He paints in words a world other than the one various authorities and their associates threaten to squeeze dry and leave destitute.



- He praises a Prague that is blossoming and a spring that lives in the memory, in the hopes of the defiant spirit of people who refuse to conform.



- He conjures up another world than that of tyranny and desolation - a world that exists both here and now, although it may be hidden from our view and bound in chains, and one that exists in our dreams and our will and our art and our indomitable spirit. His poetry is a kind of maieutics - an act of deliverance.

{see next post for example of Seifert's poetry}

STRUGGLE WITH THE ANGEL

God knows who first thought up
that gloomy image
and spoke of the dead
as living shades
straying about amongst us.

And yet those shades are really here --
you can’t miss them.
Over the years I’ve gathered around me
a numerous cluster.
But it is I amidst them all
who is straying.

.......................

{first stanzas of "Stuggle With the Angel"}

JAROSLAV SEIFERT
tr. from the Czech by
EWALD OSERS

Translation © 1998 Ewald Osers, Original © 1921-1983 Jaroslav Seifert.

Juan Ramon Jimenez sought the ideal, the secrets of the spirit and the universe. Again from To Burn Completely:

The true man, the authentic man, the inherent cultivated aristocrat, who unites the greatest sensitivity in daily life to the greatest richness of a greater life, is he who most desires the happiness of the world, he who seeks his own happiness in the universal happiness, he who succeeds by means of a clear concept of the whole life of the world, in best occupying, using, and enjoying his space and time.

Or from Poetry and Literature:

In reality the poet, when mute or when writing, is an abstract dancer, and if he writes, it is out of everyday weakness, for to be truly consistent he ought not write.
{from the Pemmican Press describing nobel poet Juan Ramon Jimenez; the Russell Edson statement about prose vs. poetry is interesting and maybe argueable. This article to be followed by a sample of his work}

http://www.pemmicanpress.com/articles/jimenez.html

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&...0oyww#PPA15,M1 ...........The poems of Jimenez are well protected unless you read spanish. This link will allow reading of several of his poems in both Spanish and English.

CITIES AND THRONES AND POWERS

(Prelude to "Puck of Pook's Hill")

CITIES and Thrones and Powers
Stand in Time's eye,
Almost as long as flowers,
Which daily die:
But, as new buds put forth
To glad new men,
Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth,
The Cities rise again.

This season's Daffodil,
She never hears,
What change, what chance, what chill,
Cut down last year's;
But with bold countenance,
And knowledge small,
Esteems her seven days' continuance
To be perpetual.

So Time that is o'er-kind
To all that be,
Ordains us e'en as blind,
As bold as she:
That in our very death,
And burial sure,
Shadow to shadow, well persuaded, saith,
"See how our works endure!"

{Nobel Prize Winner, 1907}

Thanks for refreshing our memory, of the wonderful poems read so long ago and forgotten in the course of living the 'real life'. It is all too easy to overlook the fabulous diversity of expressions and compositons, and simply get hung up on a single track!!