I had to abandon all my other concerns, those which I might call corporal, and to retreat to the countryside far from my former activities. The vacuum thus created was soon invaded by another activity which did not call for physical exertion and could easily be combined with the rest that the doctors had ordered me to take. I began to write with complete dedication and it was then, only then, that I became possessed by the passion which was never to leave me. Hours of solitude, hours of creation, hours of meditation. Since that time I have always proclaimed that poetry is communication, in the exact sense of that word.
Poetry is a succession of questions which the poet constantly poses.
Each poem, each book is a demand, a solicitation, an interrogation, and the answer is tacit, implicit, but also continuous, and the reader gives it to himself through his reading. It is an exquisite dialogue in which the poet questions and the reader silently gives his full answer. I wish I could find fitting words to describe what a Nobel Prize means to the poet. Hence my gratitude for this symbol of the collected and simultaneous voice to which the Swedish Academy has enabled me to listen with the senses of the soul for which I here publicly render my devoted thanks. We can conceive of a poet who has been born with the highest talents to accomplish a destiny.