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17 Poems

Disciplines:
poetry

Summary

Tomas Tranströmer's debut poetry collection — immediately recognized as a major new voice in Swedish literature, notable for its precise natural imagery and its exploration of the border between waking and dreaming.

Core Contribution

Tranströmer's characteristic method already fully formed: precise, almost geological observation of the natural world combined with sudden visionary jumps to inner states. The poems as points of contact between the external and internal worlds. Swedish modernist poetry achieving formal mastery in a first book with almost no precedent in its clarity and condensation.

Historical Influences

Gunnar Ekelöf Wallace Stevens

Intellectual Lineage

Swedish Poetry Modernist Poetry

Allied Works

Baltics The Wild Market Square The Great Enigma

Contemporaries & Peers

Baltics The Wild Market Square

Minds Influenced

Scandinavian Poetry Robert Bly

Intellectual Posterity

Swedish Poetry Nordic Modernism

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17 Poems

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