Gunnar Ekelöf occupies a formidable position among twentieth-century Swedish poets, and yet that position is not easily defined. As an intellectual and often as a social and political outsider, Ekelöf moved constantly between the two poles of tradition and innovation. His poetry constantly alludes to and has to be read against the background of classical Swedish poetry (represented by Carl Michael Bellman, Erik Johan Stagnelius, and Gustaf Fröding), particularly the Romantics, while at the same time it makes continual reference to myths and images of the Greco-Roman or Mediterranean tradition of Petronius, Virgil, and Homer. At the other extreme, Ekelöf's first poetry collection, Sent på jorden: Dikter 1927-1931 (Late Arrival on Earth: Poems 1927-1931, 1932), is generally regarded as having introduced Surrealism and modernism into a largely tradition-bound Sweden. In his collection Strountes (Nonsense, 1955), with its word-juggling, "low" rhetoric, and...