Ecological Politics in Swedish Poetry of the 1980s

During the ‘70s and ‘80s the environmental movement grew strong in Sweden – mainly due to the results of an ongoing discussion concerning nuclear power, which resulted in a referendum in 1981. This occasion coincided with the ending of fifteen years of left wing domination of the Swedish literary debate and production. Politically, though, the leftist activist authors – often of a Maoist or Leninist creed – became more engaged in questions concerning sustainable development, and national and international questions of pollution and unbalanced ecology. This new sphere of political debates and activity were taken up by poets that had made their marks as progressive in the 60s and 70s. One of them is Göran Palm (1931 - ), who in 1984 published the first part of his book length blank-verse poem, Sweden: A Winter’s Tale.The poem is inspired by Heinrich Heine’s 1844 epic poem Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen; a text saturated by Heine’s own experiences of the repressive German policies that had forced him into exile.

This paper will use Palm’s poem that was completed in 2005, as a paradigmatic example of the ecological turn in Swedish Poetry of the late 20th century. The methodological and theoretical base of the paper is the discussions about an ecocritical literary criticism, sprung from the environmental movements in Western Europe and in the US. Main thinkers of this theory that I will use as a tool for my historical interpretations are (e. g.) Jonathan Bate, Terry Gifford, and Sheryl Glotfelty.