Edith Södergran

Edith Södergran was a Swedish-speaking Finnish poet, born in Saint Petersburg in 1892 and dead at Raivola, in Finland, in 1923 at the age of thirty-one. She wrote in Swedish at a time when poetry in that language in Finland was in a low point, and she is regarded as one of the first modernists in Swedish-language literature. Her lasting importance lies in freeing verse from regular rhyme and traditional imagery, a shift that shaped many later poets in the Nordic countries.

She grew up in a middle-class Swedish-speaking family. Her father, Mats Södergran, suffered repeated business setbacks, and the household moved between Saint Petersburg and the village of Raivola on the Karelian Isthmus. She attended the German school of St. Petri, where she learned German, French, English and Russian, but received little formal teaching in Swedish. Her first poems were written in German. Around 1908 she chose Swedish as her main literary language, a decision that was far from obvious, since she had little contact with Swedish-language literature in Finland.

That same year she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, the disease that had killed her father. She spent long periods in sanatoriums in Finland and Switzerland, where she read Dante and studied Italy. After returning to Helsinki in 1914 she met writers such as Arvid Mörne, who encouraged her to keep writing, and her first book, Dikter, appeared in 1916. Her poems, shaped by the landscape of Raivola, German expressionism and Russian futurism, drew mixed reactions from critics.

With Septemberlyran (1918) she combined Nietzschean ideas with a fierce joy in life, and its publication sparked debate about her mental state. Her later poetry became more religious and resigned. Her last book, Landet som icke är, was published posthumously in 1925. She died before seeing the wider recognition that followed. Today she is considered one of the great modern poets in Swedish, and Raivola became a place of pilgrimage for her readers.