In a memoir that Tranströmer wrote for his two daughters, shortly before his devastating stroke in 1990, the poet recounted the impact which his Latin classes had on him as a student. Summoned to translate a stanza by Horace he stammered and mangled the verses; but suddenly, when the ordeal was over, and the teacher returned to the original, he marvelled at the beauty of the Latin, and especially "the prodigious precision of Horace's voice". This was his first encounter with poetry. The class, with its alternation of stammering and humdrum recitation and the magnificence of the original, he said, "taught me what the conditions of existence were". Ever afterwards, he would think of Horace — along with the French Surrealists! — as "his contemporaries". 

This odd conjuncture of the classical and the irreverently spontaneous characterises Tranströmer's singular voice. His poetry is unmistakable and inimitable. From "Baltics", his great narrative sequence, to his later, more lapidary verse, written out of aphasia, he has been a poet for whom silence is as telling as speech. He is a poet fluent in "language without words" and that is a language we all understand.