Modern Woman

Edith Södergran

Södergran’s daring, avant-garde work outraged many of her Finland-Swedish contemporaries who clung to traditional literary sensibilities. Through dynamic symbolism and fluid logic, the poems comprising her first collection fundamentally questioned early twentieth-century notions of what poetry is and what it can do. “Something like this has never been heard before,” noted critic and fellow Finland-Swedish poet Hagar Olsson about her work. During her short life, Södergran enacted the poet’s ultimate task of imagining previously unexplored possibilities for language, ushering literary modernism into Swedish-language writing and inspiring generations of writers since.