You should listen to the silence
the silence behind applications and allusions
the silence in the rhetoric
or in the so called formally complete
This is a search for meaninglessness
in what is meaningful
and the other way around
And everything I so artfully seek to compose
is conversely something artless
and the entire fullness empty
What I have written
is written between the lines
Gunnar Ekelöf (1907 – 1968) was considered one of Sweden’s leading and most important twentieth-century poets who produced deeply intellectual and challenging works that weave in many different languages and cultural influences. A lifelong outsider, he is known for introducing surrealism and modernism to Swedish poetry, and for his late-career Byzantine trilogy, beginning with Dīwān över fursten av Emgión (1965) (Divan on the Prince of Emgión), which received the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 1966.