Johannes Edfelt
Johannes Edfelt (1904–97) was a Swedish poet, writer, translator and literary critic. He might described as a traditionalist in verse and a modernist in imagery. Many Swedish poets but also Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Charles Baudelaire, Carl Gustav Jung and T. S. Eliot influended Eliot's poetry.
He published more than 20 collections of poems including renderings of Georg Trakl, Novalis, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound into Swedish. In 1969, Edfelt was elected to be a member of the Swedish Academy.
Palimpsest of the Soul—Allusions in the Poetry by Johannes Edfelt is Torgny Lilja's dissertation and the synthesis of 10 years' university education in literary theory, linguistics, Russian, and philosophy. Lilja analyzes separate sections as well as comprehensive motifs in an intertextual light that to a high degree clarifies Edfelt's poems.
During a scholarly odyssey, where we meet names like Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Freud, C.G. Jung, and T.S. Eliot—to name just a few, Lilja demonstrates how the literary discourse inherits a conflict between tradition and reality at the same time as the individual texts discuss existential problems.
The conclusion drawn is that only our view of the future can determinate the present and that the poet himself must not forget about this. Lilja's book is one of the first larger studies on this great Swedish author. The dissertation has an abstract and summary in English.