The subject of this dissertation is the Finland-Swedish author Gunnar Björling (1887-1960) and his journey towards Modernism. The principle thesis of this dissertation, the idea that Björling’s distinctive language cannot be understood without an underlying modernistic current, is outlined in Chapter I. It also discusses the idea that Modernism cannot be reduced to a matter of style, but encompasses particular values, ideological stances and practical matters, such as the forming of alliances, writing manifestos and publishing journals. Chapter II examines how and why Björling came to be regarded as a modernist. A strongly contributing factor was Björling’s language, which from the very first violated prevailing ideas on acceptable forms of expression. The fact that he published his first book through the modernist publishing firm Daimon, and contributed to its journal Ultra, further confirmed his modernistic placing. Chapter III focuses on Björling’s unpublished juvenilia from the 1910’s. The young Björling wrote traditional rhyming verse but was also influenced by writings of a more symbolistic and modern character. The chapter concludes with a study of bizarrerierna, Björling’s dream notes, originally written during the 1910’s but first published in 1928. With their bold enjambments and highly compressed form, these notes came to influence the continued development of his lyrical imagery. Chapter IV deals with his debut Vilande dag (Resting day) (1922) and its symbolistically coloured language problematic. Björling struggled to find a language that would convey his experience of the limitlessness of being, a language striving to transcend words, leaving space for silence. This struggle for the right words continues in the later Korset och löftet (The cross and the promise) (1925) and Chapter V demonstrates how this is connected with the quest for God. In the wake of German Expressionism and Dadaism, Björling adopts a more disjointed syntax and a bolder and more dissonant lyrical imagery. There also occurs a thematic expansion, giving greater prominence to the daily life of the metropolis, a life transformed by media. In accordance with modernistic patterns, Björling chose to end his book with a theoretical epilogue, which is a distinctive collation of life philosophy, anti-clericalism, passionate religiousness, moral-philosophical discussions and aesthetic expositions.

This bachelor thesis engages in the question of silence in the writings of Fenno-Swedish modernists Mirjam Tuominen and Gunnar Björling, silence being understood as both a poetic theme and a question of literary form. Alongside this exposition runs a discussion about the possibilities and impossibilities of interpretation in the field of academic literary studies. This query is connected to the different ideological positions of the two writers, conjoined by ideas about anti-comprehensibility. Considering certain weaknesses of classical hermeneutics as well as the theory of deconstruction, especially in the case of reading poetry, this thesis tries to point out possible routs for a practice of a more dynamic interpretation, with special regard to understanding the trope of silence in the modernist poetry of Tuominen and Björling. The composition explicitly applies a ”method of wandering” inspired by Maurice Blanchot’s understanding of the priests of Dionysus in Hölderlin’s writings – maundering in the holy night – as a metaphor for a critique-in-the-creating. This complies to Theodor W. Adorno’s idea of the aporetic situation of the interpreter and the unsolvable conflict between scientific discourse and art understood as a medium of truth in a more radical sense. The study aspires to perform a dialogue between different faculties of interpretation, and to make this dialogue viewable, so that the question of understanding remains ambiguous in line with the poetics of Tuominen and Björling. The results that follow bare the mark of aporia, but points towards a possible reading of silence (in Björling’s and Tuominen’s writings) as connected to a certain kind of sensibility and confidence in the immanence of truth in existence.

This essay deals with the conflict between poetics and poetry in the works of Fenno-Swedish poet Gunnar Björling (1887-1960). The first two parts discuss the conflict in itself, while the third and last part of the essay discusses the movement or change through the authorship as a whole, which can be seen as leading from poetics to the poetry advocated by the first.  Björling advocates a poetry (and a general approach to life) not seeking to understand or explain reality, but meeting it in the most direct sense possible. The conflict consists of the fact that a poetics to its nature is in some sense theoretical and structured, the result of a process of thinking – which makes it inconsistent with the thesis of the very same poetics. The critique of reason which forms the basis of Björling’s poetics is in itself an example of the very same reason in practise. An important aspect of this idea of immediacy is the critique of language, which – drawn to its utmost – results in silence. Due to this, I split the conflict into two levels: the first one is the extreme, which understands the striving beyond language literally – and is highly parenthetic in the authorship; the second treats the idea of non-language and silence as in a more figurative or metaphorical sense, rather meaning an emancipation from reflective thought. This later level is the one of greater significance, being to some degree actual throughout the authorship.  Björling reaches the furthest in this strive in his late poetry, where the words to a higher degree speak with their physical presence than with their semantic meanings. In his early works the same philosophical and poetological ideas are highly present, but are not near being fulfilled until one or two decades later, reaching its peak in the very last books. The movement through the authorship is hence of a teleological nature, leading from the poetics expressed in a more reflective text prioritising the semantic aspects of language, to the text that is actually advocated by the poetics: a more immediate and concrete relation to being. By investigating the treatment of the word ”word” in Björling’s texts throughout the authorship, I show how this is intimately connected with the general style of writing. Björling reaches a greater acceptance of words as physical and part of reality, resulting in a sort of dissolution of the opposition between poetics and poetry – or, in a wider sense, between comprehensibility and incomprehensibility.