The great Syrian poet Adonis appeared on my own Nobel list three years go, and now that the committee gave the award this year to Mario Vargas Llosa—a wonderful writer—it’s clear that Adonis will spend at least another year on that list. Gerard Russell made a strong case for Adonis a couple of days ago, but there was a string of poets (see below) who won in the 1980s and ’90s, and let’s be honest: it’s a prose world….
Nobel Prizewinning Poets
Rudyard Kipling (1907)
Rabindranath Tagore (1913)
William Butler Yeats (1923)
Gabriela Mistral (1945)
Hermann Hesse (1946)
T. S. Eliot (1948)
Boris Pasternak (1958)
Salvatore Quasimodo (1959)
Pablo Neruda (1971)
Czeslaw Milosz (1980)
Wole Soyinka (1986)
Joseph Brodsky (1987)
Octavio Paz (1990)
Derek Walcott (1992)
Seamus Heaney (1995)
Wislawa Szymborska (1996)
And in 2011…? I’m still hoping for Adonis….
Hill would never make my list, James. I think he's a phony. The sort of willfully obscure, what-you-don't-know-Greek? kind of poetry that annoys the crap out of me. And when you do manage to eke your way in, the ideas are fusty and crabbed—maybe even "fascist," if you accept <a href="http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=14974" rel="nofollow">Laurie Smith'
i would pass by rich, atwood, bly–for geoffrey hill. also, the nobel panel would be sorely remiss if they passed on the chance to give their money and recognition to alice munro. her prose i think overshadowing all my favorite poets who might be considered.
Thanks for the additions to the list, Lyle. I knew there were more but didn't have the patience to rake through the Nobel site. My point about quality of poets vs. prose writers holds, I think, even now….<br /><br />I also love your additions. Rich is the only one on my original list (a top 10—I didn't list everyone), and I don't know Morejon … but I will!
Additional Nobel-winning poets include:<br /><br />Erik Axel Karlfeldt (1931)<br />Ivan Bunin (1933)<br />Juan Ramon Jimenez (1956)<br />George (Giorgios) Seferis (1963)<br />Saint-John Perse (1964)<br />Nelly Sachs (shared prize with S.Y. Agnon) (1966)<br />Harry Martinson (shared prize with Eyvind Johnson) (1974)<br />Eugenio Montale (1975)<br />Vicente Aleixandre (1977)<br />Odysseas (or