After the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature last week and all the snipping and bickering that preceded it, it strikes me that the irritating assertion by the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy that Americans do not participate in a worldwide literary conversation—“too isolated, too insular,” in his words—is perhaps refuted by the list of Nobel Laureates in poetry. David Orr points out that an American poet has never won, and, technically, this is true. T. S. Eliot had already made the transition from Anglophile to British citizen when he won; the work of Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz, who were U.S. citizens at the time of their selection, is far more informed by their home countries than their adopted one.

Still, these three poets had indelible ties to America, and I would argue that Brodsky and Milosz embodied a quintessentially American tale of immigration. Seamus Heaney, another laureate, spent many years teaching at Harvard, and packs the room at American readings. Heaney, and others from the list—Derek Walcott, Wislawa Szymborska, Pablo Neruda—are all widely read (and, in the case of the latter two, translated) in the U.S., and published by major houses. Cumulatively, these poets rank as some of the most frequent to appear in the New Yorker, which in just the past few months has published poems by British, Australian, Palestinian, Israeli, and Syrian poets, to say nothing of the varied and various ethnic roots of the American poets in our pages.

What is an American poet? Perhaps the answer is in the difficulty in answering. The answer is certainly not passport color, thank goodness. How boring that would be.

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