Volume 28, Number 3 · March 5, 1981
The Nobel Lecture, 1980
By Czeslaw Milosz
My presence here, on this tribune, should be an argument for all those who praise life's God-given, marvelously complex unpredictability. In my school years I used to read volumes of a series then published in Poland—'The Library of the Nobel Laureates.' I remember the shape of the letters and the color of the paper. I imagined then that Nobel laureates were writers, namely persons who write thick works in prose, and even when I learned that there were also poets among them, for a long time I could not get rid of that notion. And certainly, when, in 1930, I published my first poems in our university review, Alma Mater Vilnensis, I did not aspire to the title of a writer. Also much later, by choosing solitude and giving myself to a strange occupation, that is, to writing poems in Polish while living in France or America, I tried to maintain a certain ideal image of a poet, who, if he wants fame, he wants to be famous only in the village or the town of his birth.
Feature, 4325 words
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