Swedish Poetry 1
Vilhelm Ekelund (1880-1949) Melodier i skymning (
Melodies in Twilight, 1902) Feeling-toned moods dominate in Vilhelm Ekelund’s poems with their observations of nature as an eternal companion to the loneliness of the human being. The experiences of betrayal that are mediated may make a pessimistic impression but the consolation to be found in nature lends meaning to every farewell and every abandonment. The language is sensitive, the atmosphere gloomy. Ekelund is the poet of both late evening and autumn. The weariness with life expressed in the disillusioned poems in Melodier i skymning is far more ancient than the relative youth of the poet would suggest– he was 22 when the poems were written. The sense of longing to which he continually returns harks back to the Romantic era at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and yet the language bears an unmistakably contemporary stamp. Selected Collections of Poetry: Vårbris (1900) Syner (1901) Melodier i skymning (1902) Elegier (1903) In Candidum (1905) Dithyramber i aftonglans (1906) Hjalmar Gullberg The attitude the poet adopts in his poems is that of the lonely wanderer. He is a man in flight, a faithless person who can stay nowhere and with no one. As a love poet, he is a Minnesinger looking back in melancholy towards a paradise that is closed to him. He inhabits a border country, where the ruins of abandoned temples and belief systems still reach imploringly towards the sky. He can neither accept them nor abandon them. Olof Lagercrantz, from Från Aeneas till Ahlin. Kritik 1951-1975 (1978) Hjalmar Gullberg (1898-1961) Dödsmask och lustgård (Death Mask and Paradise, 1952) Hjalmar Gullberg is the great love poet of Swedish poetry, which should be kept in mind with regard to his late collection Dödsmask och lustgård. Although the choice of subject matter is darker here, the poems remain singable and melodic. The poet’s consummate technical skill turns the poems into exquisite miniatures in which rhyme and metre are perfectly handled. If the technique is traditional, the subjects are modern in their oscillation between resignation and a powerful sense of life as worth living. In his survey of the various phases of falling in SWEDISH POETRY love, Gullberg is as clear-eyed as he is naive. Passion and loathing are linked together in poems that artfully avoid the clichés and the sentimentality that threaten anyone entering the domain of the love poem. Selected Collections of Poetry: I en främmande stad (1927) Andliga övningar (1932) Kärlek i tjugonde seklet (1933) Fem kornbröd och två fiskar (1942) Dödsmask och lustgård (1952) Ögon, läppar (1959) 8