The award last week of the Nobel Prize in Literature to the French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio and comments made by a member of the Prize committee that Americans are "too ignorant" to produce great literature have only intensified the criticism here of the Nobel committee and its process for selecting winners. A chief – and not unjustified – complaint is that no American poet has ever been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. David Orr writes in the New York Times:
Lost in the usual Nobel drama was a larger, stranger and nearly
unexplainable fact: While American fiction and theater can boast of at
least a few Nobel winners (nine, to be precise), no American poet has
won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Not one, in more than 100 years.
While some point to TS Eliot as an exception, the fact is that Eliot turned his back on America at a young age and is considered a British poet.
Is it perhaps justified? After all, there are brilliant poets in many
languages, and the Nobel can only be awarded to one person a year. The
only problem is that the first half of the 20th century is widely
considered a golden age of American poetry — a judgment supported not
only by critics, but apparently by some Nobel laureates. In 1996, for
example, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published a book called “Homage to
Robert Frost” that consisted of an essay apiece by Brodsky (Nobel, 1982); the Irish poet Seamus Heaney (Nobel, 1995); and the West Indies poet Derek Walcott (Nobel, 1992). Frost himself, of course, never received the prize. Nor, for that matter, did Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore or William Carlos Williams, all of whom were alive when Nobels went to Ernest Hemingway (1954), William Faulkner (1949) and Pearl S. Buck (1938).
Leaving out Frost, Stevens and Pound is indeed a major embarrassment for the Nobel committee. And looking at the second half of the century, the failure to award the prize to Robert Lowell is another black eye to the prestige of the Nobel Prize. Surveying the landscape today, I cannot fault the committee for bypassing American poets. Orr cites John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich, but, as others have pointed out, Ashbery is overrated and certainly does not have the stature of Heaney, whose greatness was acknowledged by the Nobel committee.
I should say that German poetry has also never received much recognition by the Nobel committee. While the committee has been generous in bestowing the Nobel Prize on German novelists, only one poet – Nelly Sachs – has received the prize (in 1966), and she had to share it with the Hebrew writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon. Hermann Hesse received the prize (in 1946) for his novels, rather than for his poems.
My sense is that the Golden Age for poetry in both America and Germany ended some time ago. The long drought of Nobel Prizes is likely to continue for many years.
