The Nobel Prize in Literature 1948

T.S. Eliot

When I began to think of what I should say to you this evening, I wished only to express very simply my appreciation of the high honour which the Swedish Academy has thought fit to confer upon me. But to do this adequately proved no simple task: my business is with words, yet the words were beyond my command.  These are the words with T.S. Eliot started his Acceptance Speech in 1948. The reader’s attention is immediately on the words: the words were beyond my command. T.S. Eliot seems to communicate to the reader that the words just said “say” more than he wanted, indeed people express themselves in language. Indeed, successively he asserts “When a poet speaks to his own people, the voices of all the poets of other languages who have influenced him are speaking also. And at the same time he himself is speaking to younger poets of other languages, and these poets will convey something of his vision of life and something of the spirit of his people, to their own. Partly through his influence on other poets, partly through translation..”. According to T.S. Eliot everyone, in this case every poet, is influenced by his/her predecessors. This process is what we define as “intertextuality” and it is not only present in poetry or literary works, but in every ambits and also in human beings: “And by the same token, there is no such thing as an author, that is to say, one who originates a work of fiction ab nihilo. Every text is a product of intertextuality, a tissue of allusions to and citations of other texts; and, in the famous words of Jacques Derrida (famous to people like Robyn, anyway), ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’, there is nothing outside the text. There are no origins, there is only production, and we produce our `selves’ in language. Not `you are what you eat’ but `you are what you speak’ or, rather `you are what speaks you’” (Nice Work, D. Lodge, 1988).

T.S. Eliot is interested on language and he pinpoints what Julia Kristeva will give the name of “intertextuality” only in 1960.

In his speech, T.S.Eliot makes the reader inform about what is poetry and who is a poet because it was his task (I must therefore try to express myself in an indirect way, by putting before you my own interpretation of the significance of the Nobel Prize in Literature). But writing is a way to express himself/herself, so while T.S. Eliot explains what is poetry or who is a poet, he is also putting human beings at the center of his speech (and also of his literary research): “…any man can be of thing of far greater importance than the value of what he himself has written."