The text is arranged into two parts: in the first one you come across T. S. Eliot's Acceptance Speech for the Nobel Prize(1948), while the second one is based on the remarks the Swedish Academy addressed to him.

Well, the first part is longer than the second one and right from the start Eliot expresses his happiness for the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature; after that, he again shows his feelings for the extraordinary event, meanwhile underlining that he won it thanks to his effective use of language: " my business ... my command". What's more, this is put into a better focus in the following lines, where Mr. Eliot first stated that if he said to be unworthy to receive the Nobel Prize, he would hurt the wisdom of the Swedish Academy; in a second moment he said praising the Academy would mean that he would be aware of the given prize. But the only real thing Eliot desired in that moment was to be seen as a common human being who would feel in an excited way in a situation of extraordinary honour like the  Nobel Prize Ceremony.

In the next paragraph Eliot's aim is to give his own interpretation of the meaning of the Nobel Prize for Literature. First of all, he wanted to make clear that he did not agree with the thought about the Nobel Prize as the recognition of  a person's merit whose reputation is worldwide spread and accepted. Rather,  he came to the conclusion that the objective of the Swedish Academy is to carefully choose an individual and turn him upside down to " to fill a ... symbol". In a way, within these lines Eliot was praising himself for being the "chosen individual", so a feeling of vanity and exaltation, as a common human being would do.  According to this, a prominent attention is put on the fact that the chosen individual has to act as a world representative, so Eliot asked the audience how a poet could perform it, because, differently from painting or music, " poetry is ... the arts" and "poetry, it ... uniting them".

Concerning the previous statement, Eliot declared the right way to be a world representative appealing to poetry. Indeed a poet is supposed to overcome cultural barriers between peoples with the force of language and in carrying it out his ability to understand other people's cultures comes to the surface.  According to this, Eliot further underlined one of the main features of literature, that is intertextuality:  the French philosopher Jacques Derrida will state that " there is nothing outside the text" , so that a text would not exist if there were not any previous texts, even of different language. Besides, Eliot highlighted the power of poetry, which aids to connect people and help them understanding each other, deleting for example the so- called race differences.

In the last part of the speech, Eliot reminded people to see him as the symbol of the significance of poetry at his time, defining  himself as a "supra-national" poet, a definition directly linked to the fact poetry had helped people of different cultures to better understand themselves.

Now, in the second part of the text, preceeding Eliot's speech,  Gustaf Hellstrom took the floor to address remarks to the American poet. First of all, he defined Eliot as a modest individual and after that he drew a link between the poet's life and cultures he came across and the composition of The Waste Land( 1922), "in which... scathing criticism". What's more, Hellstrom went into depth in explaining the main themes of Eliot's masterpiece. As a matter of fact, the audience was able to come into contact with the themes that animated the whole Modernist literature. Going on, a comparison between T.S. Eliot and Sigmund Freud was carried out, sharing the high interest in the discovering and studying of human beings' inner world. But even differences were put into a better focus: whereas Freud believed that "there must be ... man's primitive instinct" , Eliot was convinced that " the salvation... to be avoided".