Gunnar Ekelöf's poetry shows more sudden turns than that of any other poet in the Thirties' group [in Sweden]. In his five books of poems he appears in turn as saboteur, seer, romantic swan, blind beggar and ruminating ferryboat man on the river of death. But his personality is so strong in all these guises that we ought to speak of his different phases in the same sense that we speak of the phases of the moon. His books may also be compared with acts of a play: they develop out of one another in an almost dialectical way, bringing one another into relief, and supporting one another as do the poems of no other modern Swedish writer.

Ekelöf is a late romantic and a modern intellectual with a scepticism so deep that from the Western point of view he can be defined as an anarchistic mystic—one who doubts reality in the Eastern way. In fact, he is influenced by Persian, Indian and Taoist mysticism. At the same time, he is in the highest degree a product of European culture, both classical and modern…. The [Swedish] poets he reminds one of most are Stagnelius (in his romantic feeling for life), Almquist (in his mingling of innocence and arsenic) and Fröding (in his anti-moralistic thought). He further reminds one of these men in his remarkable gift for form, which shows itself above all in the fact that he is more self-reliant in form than any other living Swedish poet. This in turn is contingent upon his concern with music. Ekelöf does not so much write poems as compose books of poems. His greatest innovation in form is that he applied musical principles and forms in his poems, thereby creating a poetry that is no longer either speech or song, but both. Since music is above all the speech of the feelings, this conception of form has undoubtedly supported and strengthened the romantic tendency in Ekelöf's writing. In this essay I shall make no attempt to establish the exact correspondences between Ekelöf's poetry and the various musical forms underlying it, but only touch upon the way Ekelöf's typical themes are developed, contrasted, modulated—how they shift and change and yet always lead back to the same fundamental experience. (pp. 238-40)

The so-called culture debate was in full swing [when Ekelöf's first book of poems, Late Hour on Earth (also translated as Late Arrival on Earth) was published in 1932]: the bourgeois humanistic culture [of Sweden] was being attacked from three sides—by Marxism, by psychoanalysis, and by what was called primitivism. The voices of the propagandists broke against one another, and in this swarm of high, pugnacious words Ekelöf's Late Hour on Earth had the effect of an act of sabotage—long planned in silence and effective. Unlike the propagandists, Ekelöf used the secret approach of the saboteur. His aim was destruction of the "dead forms" in the culture, rather than salvation or proselytizing. At the same time, this book of poems represented the first personal application of the ideas of surrealism on Swedish soil.

Effective destruction rests upon thought and must be preceded by a thorough knowledge of both the objects to be blown up and the explosives to be used. Ekelöf's parodies of "classical masterpieces," executed with both scorn and hidden love, showed deep familiarity with the marbled layers of classicism. The dead marble became a threefold symbol for dead beauty, for what was dead in the culture, and for what was dead in people. The technique itself was partly inspired by surrealism, but it was far from the idea of "uninhibited inspirations" which outlawed any artistic refinement. Yet Late Hour on Earth was objective as none of Ekelöf's later books were. Harsh unsentimentality, self-analysis disguised as arrogance which handled the "I" with an impassive scientific tone: "I have sunk from the function of man to the function of the floor rug," indirect satire, psychoanalysis, surrealist methods, atonalism, and cacophony, all fused into a new whole—this was something new. With suicidal ruthlessness, the ego and culture were stripped of all their attractive disguises, of all possibilities of self-defense, and indeed almost of their very reality; what was left behind was a lost child on the shore of a sea where the bullet-ridden stage sets were burning. Personal dignity was sacrificed; exhaustion, disappointment, disgust appeared with naked and indiscreet clarity…. (p. 240)

But in the middle of this fragmented, and convincing contemporary chaos, Ekelöf's genuine romantic vein comes to the surface in his hatred of reality and, above all, in his identification with the child…. (p. 241)

For the romantic the helplessness of the child was a symbol of man's helplessness in the world of objects. Ekelöf is a potential Neoplatonist: the longing for purity, passionate and resigned, sounds again and again in his poetry….

Two extremes of romanticism are on the one hand the assertion of self, which used to be called demonic but actually is human, and, on the other hand, the effacement of self, which is Christian or platonic—or Indian. The romantic swings easily from the feeling of being chosen to that of being a condemned man, god or leper. In his next book, Dedication …, which came out in 1934, Ekelöf appeared to some extent as the elect one, the representative of true existence—the dragonfly which flees from the poison of the gray ants, bringing with him a word like the seer. The epigraph of the book. "I say that one must be a seer, one must make oneself a seer", was taken from Rimbaud….

The seer here is neither the man who can gaze into the future nor the avenging prophet of the Old Testament, even though he shares certain features with the latter. Ekelöf's conception of the seer stems more nearly from Baudelaire and French symbolism. (p. 242)

[Dedication] was to be Ekelöf's positive proclamation, a half-magical attempt "to sing all death from his life," to save himself. While the surrealists committed only their "unconscious" in their poetry, Ekelöf, in keeping with his fundamentally religious nature, went back to Rimbaud and the symbolists. Not heeding Breton's warning to be cautious, he committed himself wholly to the attempt to arrive at a future "in which eternal oneness shall be ours." Even in Rimbaud the seer theory had taken on ominous accents, a consciousness of the task's unheard-of difficulty and weight; it took only a slight dislocation of his feelings for the seer to become the martyr of his own demands. One can follow this development in Ekelöf's Dedication, in which the seer ends as the martyr in Caesar's orchard, who ecstatically assents to his own death.

On closer examination, however, the seer theme is complemented in this book by something one might call a Parsifal-motif. What is imagined is not, as in Rimbaud, the demonic genius striving for oneness, the clear-sighted innocent nor the child ripened to an angel who will save the world, but rather:

        I am no human, I am an angel
        who has returned to earth in order to take hold
        of the throat of mankind with my hand!
        Evil has already burned away in me
        And the lie is not a remedy:
        I am too single-minded to cram life with lies!

But the road to single-mindedness is long. It begins with a frightening vision of life on earth as a dead man's dream, or something equally dead and eternal ("Contra Prudentium"); it goes on to visions of defeat, to Carl Frederik Hill's shattered kingdom of beauty ("Fossil Inscription"), to the "Elegies" with their great, though modern and fragmented, romantic voice and their meditations on mankind's eternally frustrated hope. (pp. 244-45)

[Even] the quiet, harmonious light with which the book closes cannot efface the ominous and unsolved conflicts. Yet, if one regards this book of poems in its entirety from the standpoint of its classical beauty (even though that is not the most significant standpoint), it is perhaps Ekelöf's finest volume. Like all proclamations, it is, as proclamation, only partly convincing; as poetry, it is always invocation, search, and struggle for solution. Both poles of Ekelöf's nature are clearly visible: Late Hour on Earth was the initial statement; Dedication is the reply.

In the first issue of Caravan, (Karavan),… Ekelöf followed his anarchistic and individualistic line—the strong sense of self. In a highly polemical prose piece entitled "Under the Dog Star," pointed and egocentric, society's frauds and lies and its blind belief in authority were attacked—with justice, certainly, though the mood reminds one of the Persian kings who had the angry and obstructing waters of the Hellespont beaten with chains. Against his picture of the rising flood of death, Ekelöf sets down the first precept in the seer's catechism: "I believe in myself, in the universe that is inside me." And as answer to the slanderers: "Those who doubt cannot judge me. I have faith." Whatever objections one may have to the arrogance or the substance of his piece, one must recognize the courageous consistency of Ekelöf's position. Such consistency can certainly lead to reaction and, at times, to collapse, but, in the best instances, it leads to new life and deepened insight.

For the next issue of Caravan, which came out in 1935, Ekelöf wrote a self-examination masked as an analysis of Rimbaud. Rimbaud, the titan of modernism, is seen as defeated, and Ekelöf's tone is entirely changed: Rimbaud wanted too much, his theory of the seer is now called the great lunatic plan and the infantile in his nature is underscored. Rimbaud is succeeded as an ideal by [the Swedish poet] Edith Södergran, "when she humbly returned to the tree of her childhood and all the simple inner realities on this side of the great visions." (pp. 245-46)

[In Grief and Stars (1936), a] changed mood carried with it a new artistic impulse beyond Södergran toward a more classical romanticism, particularly toward Hölderlin and Ekelund. At the same time, Ekelöf's application of musical principles in the composition of his longer poems reached its peak in such pieces as "Summer Night," "Dithyramb," and "The Singer's Song." Grief and Stars marks a relaxation after the great tension; the singer sings neither to change himself nor to change the world, but only to be faithful to himself, like "the solitary swan." His courage lies in his belief in the meaningless beauty of song, and his song is a romantic swan song. "The Singer's Song" is the key poem of this book: a concealed self-examination and self-assertion which lead toward new avenues. The individualistic self-assertion is seen in a new and larger perspective…. (pp. 246-47)

But the will has splintered, the poet is sacrificed to his visions and is no longer their lord; he is what the world calls sick…. The old theme of the death-dream shifts and takes a more timely form:

                Hate's time has come,
                Murder's time has come
                but earth is slowly ruined
                by the poison of indifference.

This indifference destroys also the person whose entire strength was faith, but who has lost his stars…. And out of [the painful loneliness expressed in "Summer Night"] a conviction is born that what is deepest in man cannot be communicated to another person. Each soul is a "solitary star;" it is therefore natural and perhaps just that whoever pours himself out shall meet with indifference or hate…. (pp. 247-48)

But what faith can no longer create, the destructive lack of faith can….

In the prose-poem called "The Dream," the dissolution of the old Ekelöf idea of reality is made clear. In Dedication he had been able to reach reality by stretching out his hand to "lift a stone from the ponderous heart of the world," but in "The Dream" the theme of denial of reality is in full swing…. (p. 248)

It would be reasonable to assume that it is the intellectual illusions about reality which die [in "The Dream"]. However, since the 'dreamed' or mental reality has already completely penetrated the 'outer' reality, his thought becomes intelligible…. Only the poem called "From the Foundry of the Soul" hints at another insight, and at an alternative to dreams. (pp. 248-49)

Ekelöf's next book of poetry, Buy the Blind Man's Poem (Köp den blindes Sång, 1938) introduces no new themes, but offers instead a tremendously expressive picture of the romantic's winter, of his frostiness and isolation, and for those who feel that such expressiveness is the greatest value in a poem, the book is as interesting as his earlier ones. The experience of the unreality of life, now a part of Ekelöf's vision, is presented in a ballad tone…. The singer and visionary show traces of the shadows of unhappiness; he identifies himself now with the blind beggar whose arm has a warning band in contrast to the distinctive insignia of the seer or the political rebel. He is the man whom everyone slips past and tries to ignore. He stands speechless, waiting until everyone discovers what he has already discovered: that everything is illusion and fraud…. (p. 249)

In his next book, Ferryman's Song (1941; also translated as Ferry Song), one can watch Ekelöf's distrust of reality extend to a distrust of our identity, our "I." Ferryman's Song is distinguished throughout by the battle within those "who want a purpose." The book is primarily a wrestling with a problem, a radical self-examination, at once more careful and more abstract than his earlier ones. One is reminded immediately of the later Eliot; however, the problem is entirely Ekelöf's own, and it is fascinating to watch how the feeling for life and the demand for truth, working together, drive him step by step along the narrow path of the mystic. At the same time, Ferryman's Song sharpens the problem of freedom to its point; its concern is to build the road which leads at once to personal freedom, destruction of dualism, true peace, and to the only true democracy. The key poem, "Write, Then," is dominated entirely by this striking struggle of ideas. With the help of paradoxes, it attempts to wrest from words colored by dualism a meaning beyond dualism. The first assumption is the withdrawal from everything that stands within the code of power…. (pp. 250-51)

Ekelöf's demand for sacrifice, like all demands, claims a reward. The quietistic strain in Ekelöf arises from his conviction that mankind is only a battleground, "only as a witness does a person exist." (p. 251)

It follows from this that even the important ideas of culture, the positive concept of dualism, are regarded as false ideas, full of anxiety and fantasy, built on a mistaken picture of the "I."… [Fear and wishful] thinking together have built up illusion of a self, an I. But "the truth is you are no one. / A field, a piece of clothes, a name—/ everything else is merely wishes."

One concept still remains; namely, truth in the sense of freedom from lies. Ekelöf uses this concept, now set free from dualism, as a battering ram, attempting to shake the whole building of dualism. We recognize once more the theme from Dedication, but here it is purified of the comparatively naive picture of the "I" which marked that book. (pp. 251-52)

On the whole, "Write, Then" indicates the defeat of something which one might call the atavistic romanticism in Ekelöf's work…. For this contemporary mystic it is the need for truth rather than the devotion to God which annihilates personality.

What we called the Parsifal-motif in Dedication turns up in ["Write, Then"] in a reverse form: innocence, which here is not identified with the ego but with life itself, is not that which saves but rather that which is continually sacrificed in the constant play of opposites…. (p. 252)

Good and Evil, though not in equal degree, are vampires upon innocence. The idea that instinct must be sacrificed during the continual civil war of moralism, and the dream of and compulsion toward a deeper insight into some plan beyond dualism finally led to the crystallization of three different human types. These are described in the important poem called "Categories" ("Kategorier"). The innocent and naive, the timid wild "creatures, who have not yet been confronted by the temptation of dualism," belong in the first category. In the second category are the countless moralists, those who always identify themselves with what they believe in, and who commit themselves entirely to the battle of the dragon and the knight, those not indifferent…. The third category includes the people who have advanced farthest, namely, those who have passed through the "Judaic law of rationalism." Those who are indifferent, anti-magnetic and odd, "those who try to go out as hostages from the heart, soul and destiny, taking with them only what was undefined and undefinable." In a note to the book, Ekelöf denied that this latter type of person should be thought of as an exclusive pacifist. The third kind of human being sees even ethics as a form of totalitarian narcotics: he is free to take a stand (for example, against Nazism) but also free with part of his being to refuse party identification. Simply expressed, one could say that this person is a rebel against the entire war mentality, and his hate and his battle are like heart and destiny—mere hostages.

The problem for this kind of man is, naturally, society. Society becomes for him the consciousness of the loneliness of all others. Men can only meet in reverence for one another's loneliness, based on the realization that all have in common what is best in human nature, that "what is ground in you is ground also in others." The mystic who takes "the inward and lower road" and who never renounces the condition of his freedom is in his way always loyal…. (pp. 253-54)

Ekelöf has arrived at this conclusion by accepting himself more fully than before, and by forging his weakness into his strength, in the true manner of the poet. What once stood out as "the hell of indifference" has been defeated and changed into the aristocracy of esoteric detachment. In the same sense, loneliness with its "infinite anguish" has been overcome by abandonment as the only possible form of life. The poet no longer underlines his abnormality; he is neither elect nor deprived—neither seer, blind man, nor clown. He can see himself from without with serenity and with the most unsympathetic eyes as "an absolutely useless person." (p. 254)

Eric Lindegren, "Gunnar Ekelöf—A Contemporary Mystic," translated by Robert Bly, in Odyssey Review (copyright © 1962 by the Latin American and European Literary Society, Incorporated), Vol. 2, No. 3, September, 1962, pp. 238-56.