Ögats poetik. Om Gunnar Ekelöfs "sent på jorden" och Erik Lindegrens "mannen utan väg"

Abstract

How does a motif gain and produce significance in a work of poetry? This question provides the setting for the following essay, which examines the eye and its surrounding motifs in two Swedish modernist classics: Gunnar Ekelöf's "sent på jorden" (1932) and Erik Lindegren's "mannen utan väg" (1942). Close readings of both works are followed by a comparative analysis, in which the similarities and differences between the works are discussed. The joint basis of Ekelöf's and Lindegren's poetry is the problem of seeing – a problem poeticised through the highly frequent occurrences of phenomena and notions such as eyes, mirrors and blindness. These motifs are fundamental in creating coherence and unity in each of the two poetry collections. While comparisons between them have been drawn before, this essay argues that the centrality of the eye and its surrounding motifs should be considered as possibly their greatest cause of kinship. Yet both works are their own self-enclosed poetic achievements. In "sent på jorden" the eye and its surrounding motifs correspond with the theme of time as well as anguish and death, whereas Lindegren in "mannen utan väg" applies the eyes and the mirrors as epistemological obstacles, using Narcissus as a symbol for mankind. The problem of seeing is depicted by Ekelöf as the problem of the individual, striving for blindness, whereas Lindegren's poems make it a universal matter, seeking to transcend the blindness of seeing. These differences, however, exist within the framework of a shared discourse: the poetics of the eye.