00:00I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work, a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.
00:16So this award is only mine in trust.
00:19It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin, but I would like to do the same with the acclaim, too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will someday stand here where I am standing.
00:42Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear, so long sustained by now that we can even bear it.
00:50There are no longer problems of the spirit.
00:53There is only the question, when will I be blown up?
00:55Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself.
01:03Which alone can I make good writing?
01:05Because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
01:09He must learn them again.
01:11He must teach himself that the basis of all things is to be afraid, and teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truth of the heart, the old universal truth, lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed, love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.
01:31Until he does so, he labors under a curse.
01:36He writes not of love, but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion.
01:46His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars.
01:49He writes not of the heart, but of the glands.
01:52Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man.
01:58I decline to accept the end of man.
02:01It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure.
02:05That when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock, hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening,
02:13that even then there will still be one more sound, that of his puny, inexhaustible voice still talking.
02:18I refuse to accept this.
02:21I believe that man will not merely endure.
02:23He will prevail.
02:24He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
02:35The poet's, the writer's duty is to write about these things.
02:38It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice,
02:47which have been the glory of his past.
02:50The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man.
02:53It can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
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