SOURCE: "Listening to the Voices," in Voices Under the Ground: Themes and Images in the Early Poetry of Gunnar Ekelöf, University of California Press, 1973, pp. 1-34.

In the following excerpt, Shideler asserts that the poem "Voices Under the Ground" serves as a commentary on the absurdity of death and as a reflection of the dialogues which occur within one's own consciousness.

Gunnar Ekelöf's poem "Voices Under the Ground," published in In Autumn (1951) has been only casually touched upon by Swedish critics, yet it is one of Ekelöf's major poems. In it many of the crucial themes and images of the first twenty years of his poetry reach full fruition, for, with complete technical mastery, he draws upon the unconscious to symbolize and to identify his concern with dreams and with man's alienated and mortal consciousness. At first this poem seems like an incomprehensible dialogue between...