Review of Den orörliga lågan: Analyser av femton 1900-talsdikter (1991)
Sverker Göransson (writer), Erik Mesterton (writer).
Read in 2025.
Analyses of fifteen poems, which are included in full:
- “Ingenting” (1925).
- “Stjärnorna” (1916).
- “Jag” (1916).
- “Och släckt var allt” (1925).
- “Bön till solen” (1935).
- “Ja visst gör det ont” (1935).
- “Översvämning i storslaget landskap” (1925).
- “Höstsejd” (1934).
- “Fossil inskrift” (1934).
- “Elegier III” (1934).
- “Hamlets himmelsfärd” (1944).
- “Ekos klang och morgons syn” (1954).
- “Stenblick” (1954).
- “Vermeer” (1989).
- “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915).
Ekelöf’s “Dedikation” (1934), the titular poem of its collection, is also included, but only as a bridge between “Fossil inskrift” and “Elegier III”.
The analyses were made over a period of ten years, roughly the 1980s, some as the work of single authors for other publications. The unifying force in the analyses, and in the book as a whole, is a systematic method derived mainly from the work of Michael Riffaterre and especially from Semiotics of Poetry (1978), with occasional polemics against other reading styles leading to untenable interpretations.
I had some assigned reading in this book in university and left the rest of it on the shelf for 22 years. Like the poetry that is its subject, it’s clear, condensed, and beautiful. Its approach is fruitful and cleanly demonstrated, with a refreshing honesty about the opacity of poetry as game-like and the effort required to interpret it. Of course, the fifteen poems were selected to work with the method.
The chapter on Dedikation is the most in-depth, digging into Ekelöf’s psychoanalytical themes with the appearance of surrealism, and the poet’s explicit poetics. There is an amazing end note for this chapter where a long quote from correspondence with Nils Lindhagen is offered as evidence that Ekelöf could not possibly have picked up a specific motif from the work of the painter C. F. Hill. That observation illustrates both the value of thoroughness and the distinction between Riffaterre’s semiotic method and more subjective “intrinsic” reading.