Edith Södergran and the New Voice

When Edith Södergran's debut collection ”Poems” appeared in Helsinki in 1916, no one quite knew what to do with it. The verse was free, the rhymes were gone, the I was large, nature was electrically charged. The reviewers scoffed. The booksellers did not know where to shelve it. And the collection sold roughly 50 copies.

Today the same book is one of the foundational texts of Nordic modernism. How did that happen? And what was it Södergran was really doing – at a time when there were hardly words for what she was up to?

An improbable place

She grew up in Raivola, a small village on the Karelian Isthmus, a borderland between Russian, Finnish and Swedish. Her family was Swedish-speaking but her schooling was in German, in St. Petersburg, at the respected Petrischule. She read Heine, Nietzsche, the Russian Symbolists. When she finally began to write in Swedish, it was with a language that had already traveled further than most Swedish poets ever did.

Petersburg was not a provincial city. It was one of Europe's cultural metropolises at the turn of the century. Södergran saw the ballet, heard Scriabin, read contemporary Russian Symbolists like Andrei Bely. Her intellectual birthplace was therefore far more cosmopolitan than her geographical one. That explains much: her self-evident contemporaneous modernism, her orientation toward the continent rather than toward Stockholm.

The illness that structures the life

When she was sixteen she contracted tuberculosis. The rest of her short life – she died at thirty-one – was lived in the shadow of the disease, in sanatoriums in Switzerland, in Crimea, and in the parental home, with limited contact with the literary world. Her geography was small. Her inner space was enormous.

It is tempting to read all of her work in the light of this illness. But it is a trap. Tuberculosis was her life's condition, not her subject. She did not write sickness poetry – she wrote from a place where death was possible next month, which gave the writing an acute economy of time. That is not the same as being the subject of her writing. Her subject was life, force, freedom.

The great I

“I am no woman. I am a neuter. / I am a child, a page and a bold resolve.”

Few Swedish poems have opened with such a drumbeat. Södergran's I is not the 19th century's bourgeois lyric I that seeks its mirror in nature. It is an expanding, prophetic I, at times almost Nietzschean in its grandeur. She takes the right to speak large, though she is young, a woman, sick and poor. It is a right she herself has to invent, for literature does not offer it to her.

That is what makes her poetry still so liberating to read. She does not apologize. She does not explain herself. She stands on a mountain and shouts – and we believe her, for the voice is so unambiguous.

Nietzsche, Whitman, the Gospels

Three voices echo most strongly in Södergran. Nietzsche's – above all from ”Thus Spoke Zarathustra” – gives her the prophetic tone and the idea of a coming, freer human being. Walt Whitman's – from ”Leaves of Grass”, which she very possibly read in German translation – gives her the expansive, listing, embracing lyric I. And the Gospels' – above all John's – give her the tone of light and new life.

That she drew from such different sources and made it ring as a unified voice is nothing less than an artistic miracle. It is also evidence that real originality is never the absence of influences, but a personal synthesis of many.

Nature as energy

Södergran's nature is not beautiful in any traditional sense. It is electric. The forest is a field of tension, the lake a consciousness, autumn a force that answers her. When she writes ”My future's forest is full of bears”, she means precisely that. The bears are there, both as actual animals and as a metaphor that refuses to remain mere metaphor.

It is a stance she shares with contemporary modernists like Hilda Doolittle or Marina Tsvetaeva, but she came to it on her own, in her small Raivola, without the movement's manifestos and café discussions. That is partly why her voice rings so unmixed. She had no one to imitate because no one in her vicinity was doing the same thing.

Hagar Olsson – the friend

In 1919 Södergran began a correspondence with the young Finland-Swedish writer Hagar Olsson, a contact that became one of the most important relationships of her life. Olsson understood her. In the letters – published today – one sees a Södergran who is sharp, ironic, enormously funny, and who suddenly has a conversational partner to whom nothing needs to be explained.

It is these letters that give us the fullest picture of Södergran as an intellectual. The keyed-up I of the poems is balanced here by a woman who discusses Strindberg, Tagore, the war, the economy. And who, toward the end, sick and exhausted, tries to keep up her courage by writing short little lines about her garden and her cat.

Reception and turn

When ”The September Lyre” appeared in 1918 – even more uncompromising, even more prophetic – she met with ridicule. Hans Ruin and other reviewers wrote condescendingly. She herself answered in a famous letter to Dagens Press, that her self-awareness was not arrogance but a consequence of her having discovered her task. Few Swedish writers have defended their art with greater dignity, and with less to lose.

It was not until after her death in 1923, and especially until the new generation of poets in the 1940s, that she was read as what she was: the first modernist voice in the Swedish language. Karin Boye, Gunnar Ekelöf, the whole 40-talist generation – all of them read her with wide-open eyes. She had been twenty years early.

The last year

The last poems – the collection ”The Land That Is Not”, posthumously published in 1925 – have a stillness that distinguishes them from the early ones. The volcanic has not disappeared but it has become transparent. She writes about death without drama, about nature as friendship, about God as something she almost dares to speak of without irony.

“I long for the land that is not, / for all that is, I am weary of desiring.”

She died in Raivola on 24 June 1923, Midsummer's Eve. The family was poor after the Russian Revolution had taken their assets; the illness had hollowed out her strength. But she died in her own home, with her mother at her side, and with the poem ”The Land That Is Not” among the last she wrote.

Reading her now

There is a risk with Södergran: to read her purely biographically, as a tragic fate with poetry as a bonus. The poor, sick, misunderstood young woman is a convenient story, but it makes her smaller than she is. She is not her tuberculosis. She is the poems.

Go back to ”Poems” from 1916. Read ”The Day Cools”. Read ”The Land That Is Not”. Notice how the great I is always balanced by a quiet, almost matter-of-fact observation. She is not only ecstasy. She is also the one who sees her own ecstasy from outside, and lets us do the same.

That is why she survives. Her life was short, her output small, but every line bears a pressure as if she knew the time was limited. She managed to say what needed to be said. And a hundred years later the lines still stand – still as young, still as defiant, still the first new voice in a language that needed her more than it knew.