Swedish Poetry 1
TRADITIONAL FORMS AND MODERNISM It would be a lon
g time before the concepts of Modernism made any extensive impact on Swedish poetry. And though there were one or two pioneers, as early as the 1910s, who were influenced by the convulsions taking place in Europe, traditional forms of poetry would maintain their grip. A rejection of modernism has endured even into our era, and this should be borne in mind if one is to understand some of the poetry debates that have taken place in Sweden. The traditional Swedish poets cannot, however, be said to form a uniform school – represented as they are by both by Vilhelm Ekelund’s fin-de-siècle melancholy evocations of mood and the formal metrical perfection of the poems of Hjalmar Gullberg. While both could be said to belong among the more popular twentieth-century Swedish poets, their popularity with readers bears no comparison with some of the earliest Swedish modernists, such as Pär Lagerkvist, Karin Boye and Gunnar Ekelöf. It may be paradoxical that the latter writers, who produced such challenging poems, would turn out to be so widely liked even into the twenty-first century. 7 SWEDISH POETRY