the pathless man is a collection of poems by Erik Lindegren published in 1942. With its polyphonic, pictorial language, it is considered one of the most distinctive and ground-breaking collections of poetry ever published in Swedish.
The book's forty poems constitute a union of disharmoniously shattered imagery collected in a harmonious and symmetrical form, so-called fragmented sonnets, each consisting of fourteen lines divided into seven two-line stanzas. Lindegren's intention, like a literary equivalent to Picasso's painting Guernica, was to express the powerlessness of his contemporaries during World War II.
the pathless man was written in 1939-1940. Literary influence is noticeable from T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, Gunnar Ekelöf's Sent på jorden and his friend Artur Lundkvist's 1930s poetry. Impressions from surrealism and Lundkvist's dissemination of the latest modernist poetry was also important. Lindegren was also strongly influenced by such surrealist visual artists as Salvador Dali and members of the Halmstad Group, as well as classical music, primarily Stravinsky and Bach, when creating the poems.
To see the entire collection in a dual language version, go to here.
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