Swedish Poetry 1
The Poetry Debates A fierce debate was waged duri
ng the 1980s concerning the difficulty and obscurity of poetry. This was not the first Swedish debate on this subject as the poets of the 1940s were also accused of writing incomprehensibly. What distinguished the argument in the 1980s was that it was women poets in the main who were attacked for writing poems that were hard to understand. They included Ann Jäderlund and Katarina Frostenson, who would subsequently both make their mark with a range of powerful books that served as an implicit response to the criticism. The lesson that may be drawn from this dispute is that picking on poets is really not a good idea because they will make sure to have the last word. During the first decade of the twenty-first century a wide-ranging debate took place that focused on linguistic materialism (also known as the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school of poetry). This clash led to the polarisation of the world of Swedish poetry into two camps. One stood for the conventional way: writing poems that are easily identifiable and recognisable. The other represented a so-called linguistic materialist way of writing that is more experimental and has explicit connections to visual art. Notable figures in the latter camp are poets such as Lars Mikael Raattamaa and Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson, who focus on language games that continually explore new ways of depicting reality. The Best of Both Worlds However, the poetry that can be said to have come out best from these struggles combines tradition with the new ideas. This is exemplified in the work SWEDISH POETRY 42