"Poetry is something which is only done by the whole man."
Gunnar Ekelöf

Gunnar Ekelöf came to poetry by a circuitous route. He first studied music in Paris, and when he abandoned that, it was to move to London to pursue Oriental Studies. It was not until illness forced him to drop his plan of travelling to Asia that he finally turned to poetry. He did not relinquish either interest and the poetry of his later years has often been characterized as a kind of Eastern music but many years had to pass before such a synthesis could be effected. First there came a surrealist phase, and then, for decades, lyrical and metaphysical impulses merged to shape a unique and constantly changing idiom. This "middle phase" forms the bulk of Ekelöf's production and is crucial to any tracing of his full trajectory. Leonard Nathan and James Larson have made a judicious selection and a careful translation of poems from these decades (1938-1959). In Songs of Something Else we now have for the first time a full sense of Ekelöf's poetic dynamic. After reading this volume sequentially we are better prepared to follow his ultimate mystical undertaking, the Byzantine triptych comprising the Diwan over the Prince of Emigon, The Tale of Fatumeh, and Guide to the Underworld. No previous selection has managed to impose perspective upon the spiritual growing pains of this most volatile poet.

Ekelöf's first collection, Late Arrival on Earth which he referred to as his "suicide book," was published in Sweden in 1932. That mordant epithet may allude to some felt impulse; it may on the other hand signal a belief that one has to die to all competing aspirations in order to be reborn as a poet. Ekelöf never treated his calling as anything but sacred.

Late Arrival on Earth reflected the strong influence of the French Surrealists, even though Ekelöf repudiated the undisciplined working methods of Breton and his followers. But a more profound influence was Rimbaud, whom he translated, and in whom he found the appealing vision of poet as scientist:

The poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness. He searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences … he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the one accursed and the supreme Scholar!

(Rimbaud letter to Paul Demeny, 1871, tr. Wallace Fowlie)

And, truly, Ekelöf's early poetry was a strenuous Rimbaldian assault upon poetic respectability, its tendencies both gnomic:

Hair and fingernails grow slowly into the silence
The door's lips are closed to reversed values
(from "At Night," tr. Robert Bly)

and frenzied:

crush the alphabet between your teeth yawn vowels
the fire is burning in hell vomit and spit now or
never I and dizziness you or dizziness now or never.
(from "Sonata for Methylated Prose," tr. Robert Bly)

Late Arrival on Earth may have been shocking in its day, and it did bring the stream of surrealism northward, but one could not really say that Ekelöf had found his voice. These lines have little in common with the unique, haunted sonorities of the later lyrics. I would speculate that the transition from early to middle phase was prompted by Ekelöf's discovery of his own unique vocal instrument. Most likely there were transitional poems for few poets step unerringly into mature style but these are not represented in Songs of Something Else. Here, right from the start, we hear the clear, unconcealed speech of a man.

In their Introduction, Nathan and Leonard discuss the phenomenon of Ekelöf's voice:

As our familiarity with and affinity for the poet grew, Ekelöf's poetic voice came to seem to us the most important formal element in these poems. This voice is impossible to describe in general terms inward, remote, reflective, formal, severe, yet somehow colloquial but we became convinced that if we could convey something of the quality of this voice in English, our problems would be solved.

It is a measure of their success that, for all the diversity and tonal variation of these lyrics, a clear print of identity is struck on the page. To speak of a "voice" in this way is not just to speak of sound or characteristic diction, either. Voice, in this higher sense, is realized inner speech; it is the all-but-intangible quality that marks off greatness from high competence in a writer. For there is no voice without the daring of self-exposure. In Ekelöf this self-expo-sure is critically linked to a vision of self-transformation: he was, by his own avowal, a mystic in pursuit of enlightenment. Poetry was for him the agency of soul-making.

The spiritual aspiration was present from the start the early study of Oriental religions was already purposeful. And the subsequent transformations comprise a continual movement toward the "something else" that he apostrophizes in his poems. The mystic, by definition, cannot believe in the sufficiency of the material world. He believes in the soul and the possibility of its communion with a universal force. For some mystics that force manifests itself as a pervasive moral order, a logos deriving directly from a deity. For others and Ekelöf was of this stamp it is sheer being, a potency pervading all, a tao (though he never names it as such) bearing no moral imperative, requiring only submission. Ekelöf's poetry, from the middle period on, is a path toward submission. The convolutions of that path indicate just how much of a struggle with contrary tendencies was involved.

In "Elegy," the very first poem in this collection from the section dated 1938 Ekelöf writes:

And fall will return again
however much of spring there was!
What does it matter to life
that someone calls himself "I"
and pleads for his wishes!
What does it matter to earth
which slowly turns itself around
from season to season
that someone struggles against its turning!

We humans lack patience,
we have no time to wait,
but darkness is all around us
and darkness has ample time:
Suns and stars are wheels
that move the eternal clock
—slowly, infinitely slowly
everything is altered
to eternally the same.

Both Eastern and Western mysticism call for the overthrow of the "I" it is illusion, obstacle, sin, maya. Here, though Ekelöf is declaring the frailness and inconsequentiality of the "I," he opposes nothing to it but infinite magnitude and endless time. No sense of higher animate being is given. Implacable, mechanistic law is implicit, but the "I" has no connection to it. It "pleads" and "struggles," while the earth, active but indifferent, "slowly turns itself around." What tension there is in the poem derives from the simple contrast between the finite and the infinite orders. We find simplicity, plainness of utterance, and, in spite of the exclamation points, calm the calm of the stoic's sidereal perspective. But a familiarity with Ekelöf's later torments suggests that it is an unearned, mentally-grounded calm. The Ekelöf who speaks here, or in the lovely short poem "Coda," also from this period, has not yet passed through the purging fire. The grip of intellect has not yet been shattered.

There is a striking difference between these two poems. Life, in "Elegy," is rendered as utterly neutral ("What does it matter to life / that someone calls himself T"). In "Coda" Ekelöf establishes some ground of interdependence ("finally / life needs those who want a meaning"). A slight red thread makes all the difference; the scale is completely different. The closing lines discover a wisdom entirely free of moral suggestion.

The well-known Zen parable relates that before initiation mountains are mountains, that during initiation mountains are no longer mountains, that initiation is past when mountains are once again mountains. Ekelöf's development embodies something of this movement. From the relative serenity of these early poems, he moves into a phase of disruptive intensity: the straight way has been lost. And the change in style is immediately obvious. We find a dialectical velocity, the goal of which, it seems, is to uproot the dialectical process, to destroy all categories of thought, to get rid of the ratio.

You say "I" and "it concerns me"
but it concerns a what:
in reality you are no one.
Reality is so without I, naked and shapeless!
(from "Write It Down")

Lines like these, though they recall those of "Elegy," already carry an acceleration of breath, a greater urgency. And this soon intensifies:

What is it I want? What is it I mean?
I know what it is and I don't know what it is!
It has no name, no place, no kind
I can't call it, I can't explain it
It is what gets a name when I call
It is what gets a meaning when I explain
It is this but before I have yet called
It is this but before I have yet explained
It is this which still has no name
What has got a name is not something else
(from "The Gymnosophist")

Or:

Ο deep down in me
from the surface of the eye of black pearl
is reflected in happy half-awareness
a picture of a cloud!
It is not this that is
It is something else
It exists in what is
but is not this that is
It is something else
Ο far far away
in what is distant
there is something close!
(from "Absentia animi")

In these poems Ekelöf is hunting the paradox; he negates his negations, tries to point by way of a stream of cancellations at that "something else" that cannot be named, but that exists, essential, in spite of every mental operation. From a philosophical perspective it appears that he is trying to break through from the phenomenal to the noumenal reality which, according to Kant, is impossible. The problem is, of course, the "I," that net of deceptions. Ekelöf tries to repudiate the "I" in "Write It Down," but he cannot. At best he can frame its indeterminate status. As we see in "The Gymnosophist," he requires an "I" as a provisional pivot. Without it, he cannot hurl himself at the surrounding flux. These epistemological assaults are not, perhaps, the most successful poems in the Ekelöf canon their single-mindedness limits them but they demonstrate an energy and commitment that are not to be denied. Ekelöf, so obviously not interested in being innovative or "different," is forcing his poetry to accommodate and act upon a crisis of the soul.

This period of struggle roughly the decade between 1941 and 1951 also brings forth a sequence of sarcastic, mocking poems that logically accompany the involuted interrogations, and they signal that Ekelöf is by no means unaware of the larger social panorama. He certainly knows what an absurd figure the tormented poet cuts in the public eye. The poem "Interview" makes clever play with this and is a good example of his cutting style. Ekelöf makes a strong case for the immediate expulsion of the poet from the Republic:

If the tensions of the poet's struggle are manifest in the poems of this period, the process of inner reconciliation remains opaque. We feel a change as we read through the last poems of the 1941-1951 section. Sarcasm, negation, and argumentation, the armature of the earlier poems, are gradually replaced by lyricism. The tone becomes less and less strident. Acceptance ousts opposition. We can only guess at the sources of this reconciliation: did Ekelöf succeed in destroying his dialectical bent, was he granted some transfiguring insight? Whatever the explanation, Ekelöf is no longer at war with the premises of his being. The "something else" is not some impossible antagonist or unattainable fata morgana, but a fount of inner replenishment. As Ekelöf writes in the closing lines of "I Heard Wild Geese," closely recalling Hopkins:

The poem "Raga Malkos," which also dates from this time, gives us one kind of clue about Ekelöf's turnaround. Not only does it show his imagination repossessing the East, but it also suggests that Ekelöf is looking in that direction for spiritual resources. His invocation of the Hindu god Krishna combines languorous rhythms with a vision of immersion in experience that is far removed from the dialectical to and fro of the earlier poems:

Beautiful-eyed one, you walk
with the sway of your loins
to bathe yourself in us
the dark reeds and obscure waters
which hide the struggle
the struggle through beauty to joy
childhood through fortune
flailing fortune
wisdom and eternal life
Night and good cheer!
(from "Raga Malkos")

The final section 1955-1959 marks a completion of the cycle. The lyrical note returns but now it is very different from that in the earlier poems. There the lyricism depended upon a vision of transience. What Ekelöf stated directly in "Elegy" also emerged in more crepuscular fashion in "To Remember":

But in the poems from the late 1950s it is clear that Ekelöf has changed the whole basis of his perception. The "I" has been vanquished, and what was formerly suffered as transience is now celebrated as the truth of eternal movement. Eastern spirituality is everywhere evident. Poem after poem is now imbued with the idea of the Void the Nothing that is the plenum through which all creation passes:

This music is like ankle-rings
if nothing is the ankle and nothing the rhythm
in which the foot stirs itself and slowly stamps
round round a rounded carpet.
(from "Like Ankle-rings")

And:

That's why you sing for me bird, that's why the raw chill feels fresh
Seductive tones, seductive tones, o hunger that can be satisfied only
when you have caught in your beak the insect of nothing
that every moment vanishes in the empty air.

(from "Why do you sing my bird")

The "insect of nothing" is quite compatible with the lyric mode. If we read "Why do you sing my bird" right after "Elegy," we can see that a complete transformation of vision has been effected, with no sacrifice of delicacy or poetic power.

Ekelöf is, I have stressed, a poet for whom creation and self-discovery are a single process. He is not being rhetorical when he writes: "Poetry is something which is only done by the whole man." This identification cannot but raise the stakes: each finished poem is there for itself and as a moment, or step, in a sustained search. We do not know the eventual issue of that search any more than the poet does. The oeuvre reminds us, more than any single poem, that identity is not a gift passively received, but a determined creative action in the midst of a vast unknown. Ekelöf's evolution from Western skepticism to Eastern mysticism is a fascinating pas de deux of mind and spirit, all the more fascinating in the way that it bypasses Christianity entirely. His path is eccentric but no more so than that of Yeats or Merrill. Complex souls have complex expedients. For our part, we must hope that Songs of Something Else will prompt the publication of all three parts of Ekelöf's triptych. Then we will be able to start assessing the full meaning of these expedients….