He started the discourse speaking about the prestige of the prize that was given to him, saying, indirectly, that it is the highest honor a poet could receive. “My business is with words, yet the words were beyond my command”: first of all, word could be considered the key word of the sentence. The word represents the instrument of the poet, the point of start of everything for him. But he says he is dominated by language, not the contrary. The concept is very similar to the word used by D. Lodge “you are what speaks you, we produce ourselves in language”. Language says everything about a person, his culture, point of view and so thinks Eliot. But he says he cannot find any word to express what he feels, because the award is different from any other and the emotions that comes out from that nomination are different from any other so there aren’t word to express them: he must try to say it in an indirect way. For him, the Nobel means no recognition of merit or passing the boundaries if his country or language. For him it is the name of a individual that become a symbol, a symbol that represents poetry. He says that poetry is the most local of all arts, so the less known, maybe underrated or ignored also because it could be no understood by any one like music, art, sculpture. “Language is a different matter” he says. As “word” was the key word before, now that place is taken by “language”, a kind of evolution of the previous key word. All the speech turns around the same concept: the importance that language has for him and  for men. Poetry is for him an attempt to go beyond the “barrier of language” as he calls it, the barrier created by different kind of language of many peoples. Language has inside him the culture, the history, the people. Every different kind of poetry, even in different languages, is, for Eliot, important. Thanks to other poets, the poetry can evolve, become different and new, by its elaboration and study “the poetry of every country and every language would decline and perish were it not nourished by poetry in foreign tongues”. The poet speaks for all the poets that influenced him, that allow him to write that poem.

So, from his point of view, comes out an univocal vision of the world of poetry and literature. All poets are connected, as also all their cultures and people they represent. Every poet is the result of the literature that existed before him and also belonged to other countries.