Article Dream Poems. The Surreal Conditions of Modernism Louise Mønster Institut for Kultur og Globale Studier, Aalborg Universitet, 9220 Aalborg Ø, Denmark;
[email protected] Received: 28 September 2018; Accepted: 6 November 2018; Published: 7 November 2018 Abstract: The article discusses three Swedish dream poems: Artur Lundkvist’s “Om natten älskar jag någon…” from Nattens broar (1936), Gunnar Ekelöf’s “Monolog med dess hustru” from Strountes (1955), and Tomas Tranströmer’s “Drömseminarium” from Det vilda torget (1983). These authors and their poems all relate to European Surrealism. However, they do not only support the fundamental ideas of the Surrealist movement, they also represent reservations about, and corrections to, this movement. The article illuminates different aspects of dream poems and discusses the status of this poetic genre and its relation to Surrealism throughout the twentieth century. Keywords: Nordic modernism; poetry; surrealism; dream In modernist poetry, writings are not necessarily something you write, and dreams are not necessarily something you dream. Here, the boundaries are far from fixed. Modernist works often combine different aspects, not just to break with earlier norms and categorizations, but equally to create a freer flow between forms and genres. This also applies to the relationship between poems and dreams. In the modernist tradition, many poems thematize dreams or try to adopt their form. To say about a modernist writer, that he or she writes like a dream, is not always just a normative statement. Rather, it can also be a fact. As a category, dream poems speak both of the modernist self and of the relationship of the self with the world.