First Nobel Prize for Literature
http://nobelprize.org/award_ceremoni...hen/index.html This first Nobel was for poetry...French Poet...Sully Prudhomme 1901
Pablo Neruda/excerpt from his Nobel lecture, 1971
Further on, just before we reached the frontier which was to divide me from my native land for many years, we came at night to the last pass between the mountains. Suddenly we saw the glow of a fire as a sure sign of a human presence, and when we came nearer we found some half-ruined buildings, poor hovels which seemed to have been abandoned. We went into one of them and saw the glow of fire from tree trunks burning in the middle of the floor, carcasses of huge trees, which burnt there day and night and from which came smoke that made its way up through the cracks in the roof and rose up like a deep-blue veil in the midst of the darkness. We saw mountains of stacked cheeses, which are made by the people in these high regions. Near the fire lay a number of men grouped like sacks. In the silence we could distinguish the notes of a guitar and words in a song which was born of the embers and the darkness, and which carried with it the first human voice we had encountered during our journey. It was a song of love and distance, a cry of love and longing for the distant spring, from the towns we were coming away from, for life in its limitless extent. These men did not know who we were, they knew nothing about our flight, they had never heard either my name or my poetry; or perhaps they did, perhaps they knew us? What actually happened was that at this fire we sang and we ate, and then in the darkness we went into some primitive rooms. Through them flowed a warm stream, volcanic water in which we bathed, warmth which welled out from the mountain chain and received us in its bosom.
Elias Canetti/neglected and Nobel
"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
Swedish Poet, Harry Martinson
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
When Earth's Last Picture is Painted
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)
Growltiger's Last Stand/ T.S.Eliot
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
Juan Ramon Jimenez, Nobel Prize, 1956
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.