[Ekelöf], the unique poet of his generation, led a self-tormented existence, to which his elegant, impersonal poems rarely furnish a clue. His family background, reminiscent both of Ibsen's Ghosts and Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata, left him to the mercy—one should perhaps say to the mercilessness—of the private pledge and the dream, to an obdurate alienation from his own culture. "I learned to hate Europe and Christianity," he confessed. By dint of application, he learned to hate a large surface of the inhabited globe, present and past. (This is the authentic, but concealed, virgin spring of the Swedish Middle Way.) Ekelöf's immersion in Oriental languages, from which derived the fabulous poems in [Selected Poems, translated by W. H. Auden and Leif Sjöberg, 1971,] was as ambivalent as his other commitments (e.g. his fine translations of French poets whom on principle he otherwise repudiated)…. Such...