It was a great surprise and pleasure, and a signal honor, to be informed, in January, that the Organizing Board of the Struga Festival had decided to award me the Festival's "Golden Wreath" for this year, an honor magnified by the illustrious names of poets to whom this award had been made in former years. Thirty years ago, when I lived much of the year in France , I was invited several times to the Struga Poetry Festival as a participant. I was here when the wreath was presented to W.H. Auden - in his carpet slippers - and I have the fondest memories of the Festival itself, of what I saw of Macedonia, its ancient towns and buildings, its beautiful countryside and its famous hospitality, and I have remained, ever since, profoundly grateful for having been able to meet poets here whom I would not have been able to meet otherwise. I am very happy to be revisiting this richly gifted and cultivated, and royally generous part of the world, and to have a chance, these years later, to express some small part of my admiration for the love of poetry in Macedonia, which brought the Festival into existence in the first place and has kept it alive through many turbulent years.

It is reassuring at any time to be reminded that, despite differences of language and culture, the love of poetry and of the sources of poetry, and of the reponse to it and the need for it, are not national or ethnic but are rooted in our common nature. It is especially consoling to be reminded of that in a time like this, with its violence, hatred, and disfiguring self-righteousness. The language of poetry is made of the loves, the raptures, and losses and griefs that we all come to know, sometimes together, and yet at the same time each of us alone. Nowhere in the world have I seen deeper and more unquestioned and natural love for poetry, both as literature and as the current of imagination, feeling, and compassion within us than I have seen here in Macedonia . I have prized the memory of that all these years and it is one of the things I want to thank you for now, most deeply of all. For I believe that if we fail to treasure and live up to that gift in each of us, that current of imagination and compassion and the response that make us care for the joys and sorrow of other lives and other forms of life we fail to live up to ourselves and so we become less than ourselves, less man human. William Blake wrote in a letter to a friend, "But if we fear to do the dictates of our Angels... if you bury your Talent in Has Earth... everyone in Eternity will leave you, aghast at the Man who was crowned with glory & honour by his brethren, and betrayed their cause to their enemies..." If we can no longer care for the grief of Hector's wife or for Juliet's love, or for the bewilderment of whales suddenly subjected to sonar, or the gifts and sufferings of animals and humans everywhere, we are indeed less than human, and the experiment of our species, however technologically inflated we may have become, will have turned out to be a failure after all and it will not even matter. The regard for poetry in the whole sense of the word, that regard which made mis Festival in the first place, and has kept it alive in times like these, continues to hold out hope for us, and I cannot begin to thank you for that.

William S. Merwin