[Ekelöf], the unique poet of his generation, led a self-tormented existence, to which his elegant, impersonal poems rarely furnish a clue. His family background, reminiscent both of Ibsen's Ghosts and Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata, left him to the mercy—one should perhaps say to the mercilessness—of the private pledge and the dream, to an obdurate alienation from his own culture. "I learned to hate Europe and Christianity," he confessed. By dint of application, he learned to hate a large surface of the inhabited globe, present and past. (This is the authentic, but concealed, virgin spring of the Swedish Middle Way.) Ekelöf's immersion in Oriental languages, from which derived the fabulous poems in [Selected Poems, translated by W. H. Auden and Leif Sjöberg, 1971,] was as ambivalent as his other commitments (e.g. his fine translations of French poets whom on principle he otherwise repudiated)…. Such wholesale immolation drove him to the border of suicide, in fact and artistically, when, in the Fifties, he fashioned a style of verse so exiguous as to be incommunicable—frozen, calligraphic, touched with obscenity—comparable in its way to the inhibited, self-abusing cinema of Bergman. In this frozen desert he nurtured a snowflush out of which incredibly bloomed the exotic penultimate poems, Dīwān over the Prince of Emgion and The Tale of Fatumeh. The first of these poems was allegedly inspired by a spiritualistic seance; its composition, begun in Constantinople, was dictated to him, the poet firmly believed, by an unseen medium. Take that or leave it: the Dīwān (it means simply a collection of poems) is an astonishing sequence of musical invocations, addressed by an 11th-century noble, captive and blinded, to a goddess, part-Madonna, part Earth-mother. (Ultimately, I am convinced, it is a parable of the tortured artist. "To be blinded sharpens the vision/Till all is light / the light of memory.") The other poem, likewise narrative-lyrical, which Ekelöf would have us interpret as a symbol of our interpersonal coldness, is told alternately in second-person and monologue form, the latter recited by the pathetic Fatumeh, reduced in her old age to the role of courtesan, after being abandoned by the Prince whose mistress she had been. Quite unlike any Western poems I can remember, these, punctuated by settings as solid and phantasmal as those of Chirico, are spiked with an odor of Eastern irony; their tone is Manichean, their dictation is crystal clear; they contain bizarre images of cruelty, passion and suffering which have a Sufistic resonance and calm. (pp. 671-72)