Although Paal Brekke began his career with two collections of traditional metrical verse influenced by Arnulf Øverland, he quickly changed his approach and became one of the driving forces of modernism in Norwegian literary history. Brekke influenced literary trends not only through his own innovative poems but also through his activities as an editor, critic, translator, and anthologist. Particularly important was Brekke's part in the Tungetale debatt (Gibberish Debate), in which he defended modernist practices against traditionalists such as Øverland and André Bjerke who contended that all poetry should be metrical and rhyming. In part through Brekke's work as a poet and mediator, especially his role as editor and translator of Anglo-American poetry and theory, modernist writing practices became popular in Norwegian poetry in the 1950s. Brekke's three T. S. Eliot-influenced collections of symbolist poetry, published between 1949 and 1960, created a poetic platform to which later...