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WHITMAN IN SWEDEN
- University of Iowa Press
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ยท' :'. ' .. ... . . . ~'::;~ .' CARL L. ANDERSON Whitman in Sweden Whitman's poetry received little more than sporadic attention in Sweden and Swedish communities in Finland in the early years of this century, but it developed into a principal source of inspiration and example to poets coming into print there after the First World War. They were ofthe "new generation," as they were soon named, and had no patience with the genteel complacencies still dominant in Swedish poetry in their time despite the many tumultuous social and political changes then under way. Whitman's democratic vigor inspired the ambition of these new poets to give untrammeled expression to the energies buried in the inner life of even the common person. They cherished Whitman's robust forthrightness and sought to capture it in translations ofselected portions of Leaves ofGrass but, more important, to rise to its demands in their own poetry. In time, they succeeded in providing the shock ofmodernism that was to alter the course of poetry in Swedish. The earliest references to Whitman in Sweden- beginning with a passing reference in 1895 - had been more or less isolated events. Ellen Key, the famous proto-feminist and a convinced Emersonian, had briefly commended Whitman's renewal of "the new spirit of the west" in her Liftlinler (Lifelines) (1903-1906). Emilia Fogelklou, theologically trained and a distinguished commentator on contemporary issues, had emphasized a few years later Whitman's message of "Joy" (Fleisher 1957, 20-21; Ahnebrink, 43). In 1905 a third woman, Andrea Butenschon, [ 3391 published in what was then Sweden's leading journal of literature and the arts a long, warmly appreciative essay on Whitman. It included in its twenty-one double-columned pages her translation of "Proud Music ofthe Storm," as well as numerous extracts from other poems. Butenschon's father was a Norwegian who had lived for many years in America . The home he later provided his family was situated in western Sweden, but at that time Norway and Sweden were still in union, and Oslo (then Christiania) remained the family's cultural center. Andrea Butenschon had literary ambitions and might well have had her attention first directed to Whitman's poetry through the admiring lectures and essays of the Norwegians Kristofer Janson and Hans Tambs Lyche, but it was her longstanding interest in India that came most distinctively into play in her Whitman essay. She had moved in literary circles during a year's travels in India in 1890-91, and she subsequently undertook Sanskrit studies in England and at the Sorbonne and at Kiel; in 1902 she published her translation ofthe Katha Upanishad, and in 1913, the year Rabindranath Tagore received the Nobel Prize in literature, she anticipated the award with a translation of his Gitanjali. In India, Tagore regularly gave readings of Whitman's poetry; his nephew, Kshitindranath Tagore, published an essay on Whitman in Bengali in 1891. The latter's endorsement of the view then prominent of Whitman as the poet of freedom and democracy was shared by Butenschon, but in her essay she also gave a more personal response: "I thought that in Whitman I had at last found what I longed for: a singer steeped in Wisdom but without dogmas and theories which everyone must accept; who sang because he could not do otherwise and bore witness with the force of his native strength to life's root meaning [urtanke ]." She accepted the sexual frankness ofthe poems as being a necessary, serious consequence of Whitman's insistence on the spirituality of all aspects of life. "He is the only one I know who has succeeded in creating a personal, living philosophy of religion practiced in his own time from the heart of the wisdom of the Indian prophets-whether he obtained his wisdom from India or not." Whatever interest Butenschon's essay may have held for her readers in 1905, it was in quite different terms that Whitman became, little more than a decade la ter, an almost legendary figure for young poets and critics anxious to break away from the Swedish equivalent ofEdwardian decorum and to give full expression to the unruliness ofpeople's inner life. German expressionism had been pointing the way, in metaphysical terms at first, but then more broadly to include advocacy of a reconstituted social order in accord with broad principles of the human camaraderie and the common good. In this context, Whitman was hailed readily enough as the truthsayer who sang in new poetic forms "of Life immense in...