Background
Vilhelm Ekelund was born on October 14, 1880, in the rural village of Stehag, in southern Sweden. In 1894 he and his family moved to Lund.
Lund University, Lund, Sweden
Ekelund attended but did not graduate from Lund University.
Vilhelm Ekelund was born on October 14, 1880, in the rural village of Stehag, in southern Sweden. In 1894 he and his family moved to Lund.
Ekelund attended but did not graduate from Lund University.
In both, his poetry and prose, Swedish poet and essayist Vilhelm Ekelund strived for beauty and soulfulness and at the same time a balance between the lyrical and classical. During the first decade of the twentieth century, he focused on poetry, writing personal verse in the romantic style. Inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ekelund then turned to essays and aphorisms to express his search for beauty and truth.
Ekelund’s early poetry, published in Varbis and Melodier i skyming, took the form of rhyming verse about personal topics, such as meditations on nature around Stehag. According to Anna Balakian, author of The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages, Melodier i skyming is considered the greatest and also the most complex of Ekelund’s collections of poems.
His later lyrics, such as those published in In candidum and Dithyramber i aftonglans, among others, were written in free verse. These poems stressed the heroic qualities of antiquity.
After getting in trouble with the law in 1908, Ekelund moved to Germany, where he lived for four years before relocating to Denmark. There he resided for another nine years before finally returning to Sweden. At the same time as his self-imposed exile, Ekelund renounced poetry in favor of prose, publishing some twenty-five books of essays and aphorisms over a thirty-year period. For example, with Antikt ideal Ekelund explored the thought of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, while in Pà hafsstranden he discussed the Nordic and classical concepts of bravery.
Many of Ekelund’s essays deal with aesthetics and as such were thus read by a small group of intellectual contemporaries. They continue to be little known outside of Sweden. Nevertheless, Erie O. Johannesson contended that Ekelund anticipated a number of different trends. In his 1984 study of Ekelund’s aphorisms published in Scandinavian Studies, Johannesson maintained, From the perspective of the 1980s, Ekelund’s aphorisms seem even more radically innovative than they did to the Finnish-Swedish modernists of the 1920s. His concerns, as well as his art, do appear decidedly contemporary - postmodern, in fact,” Johannesson added. “The general aspects of Ekelund’s works which I have stressed - his aestheticism; his festive approach to ideas; his love of lapidary form; his love of beginnings; his unsystematic philological games, ... his penchant for mysticism and Eastern modes of thought; his efforts to transform literary criticism into a form of high art; his absolute commitment to writing as a totally self-contained, free, and gratuitous enterprise; his indifference to history - all these aspects may be found, albeit in a somewhat more radical form, in the later writings of the French critic Roland Barthes.”
(Thoughts, musings, and notes from a notebook found after ...)
1966Vilhelm Ekelund was married to Anne Margrethe Ekelund. Together they had a daughter named Anne-Marie Ekelund.