[00:13.50]I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work -
[00:18.10]a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit,
[00:25.99]but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.
[00:32.89]So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be diffcult to find a dedication for the money part of it
[00:40.55]commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin.
[00:45.25]But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too,
[00:48.60]by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men
[00:53.61]and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail,
[00:58.22]among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.
[01:04.90]Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it.
[01:14.22]There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question:
[01:19.05]When will I be blown up? Because of this,
[01:23.19]the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself
[01:30.24]which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
[01:38.10]He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid;
[01:46.77]and, teaching himself that, forget it forever,
[01:51.10]leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart,
[01:57.77]the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed -
[02:04.38]love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse.
[02:14.22]He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories whthout hope and,
[02:23.56]worst of all, without pity or compassion.
[02:28.05]His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
[02:38.20]Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man.
[02:45.20]I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure:
[02:53.34]that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening,
[03:03.70]that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.
[03:13.69]I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal,
[03:22.68]not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul,
[03:29.13]a spirit capable of compassion and sacrfice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s duty is to write about these things.
[03:41.01]It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart,
[03:45.17]by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice
[03:53.62]which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man,
[04:01.19]it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
