Gunnar Ekelöf's poetry shows more sudden turns than that of any other poet in the Thirties' group [in Sweden]. In his five books of poems he appears in turn as saboteur, seer, romantic swan, blind beggar and ruminating ferryboat man on the river of death. But his personality is so strong in all these guises that we ought to speak of his different phases in the same sense that we speak of the phases of the moon. His books may also be compared with acts of a play: they develop out of one another in an almost dialectical way, bringing one another into relief, and supporting one another as do the poems of no other modern Swedish writer.

Ekelöf is a late romantic and a modern intellectual with a scepticism so deep that from the Western point of view he can be defined as an anarchistic...