When poet/critic Lars Gustafsson was the editor of Bonniers
Litterara Magasin, he was bombarded with the question, "What makes
a good poem?" Forays into Swedish Poetry is his answer. The fifteen
poems in this volume range across the history of Swedish poetry
from the 1640s, at the beginning of the Period of Great Power, to
the late twentieth century. Poets as diverse as Skogekar Bergbo,
Erik Johan Stagnelius, August Strindberg, and Vilhelm Ekelund are
discussed from historical, psychological, and sociopolitical
viewpoints. However, Gustafsson includes only those poems he
considers excellent. Each essay begins with a presentation of the
poem both in Swedish and in English translation. Gustafsson's
analyses are built upon his subjective experiences with poems and
poets and upon a more objective structural approach that
investigates the actual machinery of the poems. Thus, Gustafsson
enlightens us with his always imaginative, sometimes daring
analyses, and we learn a great deal about the critic himself in the
process. One of his main concerns is what he calls, in his
discussion of Edith Soedergran, the very mysteriousness of human
existence. Time and again, Gustafsson emphasizes the enigmatic,
arcane aspects of life in his analyses. In contrast, his vocabulary
and approach also bespeak a constant interest in science and
technology. In his introduction, Robert T. Rovinsky, the volume's
translator, presents examples of Gustafsson's various thematic
interests as voiced in his poems, several of which are translated
here for the first time. While "The Machines" explores his theory
of people as automatons and "Conversation between Philosophers" his
linguistic pessimism, Gustafsson's work as a whole shows his
enchantment with its major theme: the intrinsic mystery of life.
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