In both subject and style Ekelöf belongs among those poets we call "modern," that vague but handy term which allows so considerable a variety within a comfortably large category of likeness. Applied to poetic practice, "modern" suggests a deliberate rejection of or radical departure from convention, literary and social. The declared modern author characteristically addressed subjects that disturbed, when they did not offend or scandalize, most nineteenth-century readers, and not because such subjects sometimes violated sexual taboos, but because they would have seemed, by accepted standards, subliterary or, better, unpoetic. Modernist styles would have also seemed calculated to bewilder this same audience, denying them clear, orderly development of ideas, familiar cadences, and a common stock of allusion. (p. 6)

One of the marks of modernism is that it so easily crossed borders to create a sort of higher European intellectual culture to ward off what then passed for...