Transtromer's poems, spare and image-driven, open suddenly onto vast inner terrains, like a trapdoor in a floor you thought you knew. A working psychologist, he wrote about consciousness, music, bureaucracy, and the Nordic natural world with dreamlike precision that made him the most translated Scandinavian poet of his era. He suffered a stroke in 1990 that largely took his speech; he continued writing with his left hand. Nobel Prize 2011.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.