Arts & Culture

Edith Södergran

Swedish-Finnish poet
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Born:
April 4, 1892, St. Petersburg, Russia
Died:
June 24, 1923, Raivola, Fin. (aged 31)

Edith Södergran (born April 4, 1892, St. Petersburg, Russia—died June 24, 1923, Raivola, Fin.) was a Swedish-Finnish poet whose expressionistic work influenced a generation of Finnish and Swedish writers.

Her family moved to Finnish Raivola when Södergran was three months old. Educated at a German school in St. Petersburg, where the family maintained a winter home, she contracted tuberculosis at 16 and never fully recovered her health. Her first book, Dikter (1916; “Poems”), expressed shifting moods of melancholy and joy in a free verse form that was indebted to the Symbolist poets. This collection inaugurated the Swedish-Finnish modernist movement, which looked to German Expressionism and Russian Futurism for inspiration. Södergran wrote six volumes of poetry, and a volume of her letters was published in 1955.

4:043 Dickinson, Emily: A Life of Letters, This is my letter to the world/That never wrote to me; I'll tell you how the Sun Rose/A Ribbon at a time; Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul
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This article was most recently revised and updated by Encyclopaedia Britannica.