SOURCE: "On the Pathetic and Lyrical State of Mind," in Les Prix Nobel, Nobel Prize Foundation, 1985, pp. 228-37.

Below is Seifert's Nobel lecture, which he intended to deliver at the Nobel Prize awards ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, in December 1984. Seifert was unable to attend the ceremony due to a chronic heart ailment. In his lecture he discusses the role of poetry and pathos in Czech society and in the world in general.

I am often asked, particularly by foreigners, how one can explain the great love of poetry in my country: why there exists among us not only an interest in poems but even a need for poetry. Perhaps that means my countrymen also possess a greater ability to understand poetry than any other people.

To my way of thinking, this is a result of the history of the Czech people over the past 400 years—and particularly of...