LEIF SJÖBERG

If there has been a major shift in poetic theory during the past two centuries, it has been from an emphasis on the external world (around us) to the internal, night world (within us). Thus, for a long time the consciousness of man has been the primary target for a vast number of writers and poets. The great many ways in which these consciousnesses are suggested may be illustrated by a brief consideration of three outstanding examples, in the works of James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Gunnar Ekelöf…. Joyce devoted more than a quarter million words to revealing the complexity involved in the passage of a single, ordinary day, and later, in Finnegans Wake (1939), used as many words to dramatize a single night as experienced by a single character. Eliot, on the other hand, limited his discussion of The Waste Land to just over four hundred lines. At about the time when Joyce began preparing Finnegans Wake for publication, Ekelöf began to write En Mölna-elegi…. [Ekelöf's] theme was a single, extraordinary moment. This moment of Lebensstimmung, this second, comprises images from a number of centuries and from various cultures and religions of the past and the present; it deals with the West as well as the East and with the primitive as well as the sophisticated, and it was "work in progress" for more than twenty years. (p. 9)

Some sensitive English-speaking readers of Ekelöf's poetry are put off, because he is allegedly "strange" or "weird." To use a phrase from Finnegans Wake, I think they feel "lost in the bush." In a way this is not surprising. Even in Sweden Ekelöf often had to "educate" his audience and initiate it into the new, before any meaningful form of communication could be established. Consider that Ekelöf "worked" on his audience for a whole lifetime—with sixteen collections of poetry (1932–68), translations of his elective affinities (including such writers as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Desnos, Breton, Tzara, Éluard, Whitman, Samuel Butler, Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Auden, Hölderlin, Petronius, and others), three books of essays, numerous book reviews, articles on art, his participation in the debate on cultural questions, his poetry readings, etc., and you will see that the Swedish audience took its time before it gradually came to realize that Ekelöf often voiced precisely what so many had felt or experienced. In due course he was showered with prizes and literary awards, perhaps mainly as a result of his great appeal to the Swedish poets of the 1940s and the 1950s, whom he has greatly influenced. (pp. 9-10)

Ekelöf's situation in America is bound to be distinctly different, for numerous reasons. But I will venture the guess that had Ekelöf written in English he might have been regarded as one among many primary international influences on the current poetic climate. As things stand, Ekelöf has made modest headway in the English-speaking world. While there are readers of Ekelöf's work who in effect claim that they don't have the "poultriest notions what the forest he all means," I see this as a reason for optimism. Does it not indicate curiosity and awareness about Ekelöf as being unlike any other poet? That Ekelöf wants to reveal but also conceal, simultaneously? That in fact he "dives into the soul of the soul" and peers into the "reality behind the reality"? Like Auden's Double Man he was tormented by contrary impulses, which made him human in his fierce quest for independence. The Swedish poet Karl Vennberg summed it up neatly when he said that Ekelöf united "all those opposites that torture and elevate the poetry of our time" and could "take the guise of all those characters that still can entice those willing to risk their lives in the adventures of poetry." (pp. 10-11)