Gunnar Ekelöf

Early life and debut Gunnar Ekelöf was born on 15 September 1907 in Stockholm. He has been called Sweden's first surrealist poet. He made his debut with the collection sent på jorden ("late on earth") in 1932, written during an extended stay in Paris in 1929–1930, which was too unconventional to become widely appreciated and described by its author as capturing a period of suicidal thoughts and apocalyptic moods. It was in a sense an act of literary revolt akin to Edith Södergran's Septemberlyran of a dozen years earlier. While not disavowing his debut, Ekelöf moved towards romanticism and received better reviews for his second poetry collection, Dedikation (1934). Both the volumes are influenced by surrealism and show a violent, at times feverish torrent of images, deliberate breakdown of ordered syntax and traditional poetic language and a defiant spirit bordering on anarchism ("cut your belly cut your belly and don't think of any tomorrow" runs the black humorous refrain of a poem called "fanfare" in sent på jorden; a collection that eschews capital letters). This defiant externalism was grounded in his person. Though he came from an upper-class background, Ekelöf had never felt committed to it – his father had been mentally ill and when his mother remarried, Ekelöf strongly disapproved of his stepfather, and by extension of his mother; he had become a loner and a rebel by his teens and would never feel at ease with the mores of the established upper and middle classes or with their inhibitions and what he perceived as their hypocrisy and back-scratching. Swedish critic Anders Olsson described Ekelöf's turn to poetry as a choice of "the only utterance that doesn't expurge the contradictions and empty spaces of language and of the mind." Mid-career Färjesång (1941), showed influence from T.S. Eliot, whose poem East Coker Ekelöf had translated to Swedish. It took influence from oriental poetry and the darkness of the ongoing Second World War. Ekelöf himself considered Färjesång as his personal breakthrough and with its simple and effective language it has had an strong influence on later Swedish poetry. Färjesång was followed by the acclaimed works, the prose book Promenader (1941, "Walks"), the disillusioned En Mölna-elegi ("A Mölna Elegy", 1960), a lengthy elegy Ekelöf had already begun composing in the 1930s, was a highly personal collection of free associations, moods and memories featuring intertextual references to Emanuel Swedenborg, Carl Michael Bellman, August Strindberg, Edith Södergran, and others. The poems deal with the Proustian theme of memory; the collection has been called Ekelöf's most Joycean work. Last works Ekelöf's last works, Dīwān över Fursten av Emgión (1965, ``Diwan on the Prince of Emgion``), Sagan om Fatumeh (1966, "The Tale of Fatumeh") and Vägvisare till underjorden (1967, "Guide to the Underworld") was a trilogy with Byzantine theme. For this book, Ekelöf was awarded the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 1966. == Legacy ==