Rabbe Enckell was a Finnish poet, playwright, and critic, a leading representative of the Swedo-Finnish poetic revival that began in the 1920s. Rabbe Enckell was one of Finland’s most acclaimed poets of the twentieth century.
Background
Rabbe Enckell was born on March 3, 1903, in Tammela, Finland, to Karl and Vesta Enckell. His father was a professor of agriculture (1853-1937). At the time of his birth, Karl Enckell worked as the director Mustiala Agricultural Institute; the family moved to Helsinki after he was appointed professor at the University of Helsinki. Olof, Enckell's brother (see below), was a prolific critic and literary scholar, while another, Torger, gained international reputation as a painter. Later Enckell portrayed his father in Essay on livets framfart (1961).
Education
Enckell graduated from the high school Svenska normallyceum of Helsinki in 1921, and then studied at the University of Helsinki, leaving it without taking a degree.
At the age of nineteen, Enckell began to contribute to the short-lived culture magazine Quosego, which was the forum of Finland-Swedish modernist writers and polemicized against "village romanticism." For some years, before moving to the family farm in Vättilä, he was employed by the Academic bookstore. From 1927 Enckell worked as an artist, also publishing nearly 40 books. He debuted as a poet with Dikter (1923), intense lyrics of love and nature. Next year he had his first art exhibition.
In his early artistic program, Enckell declared that the "power which drives art to the highest achievements can not be anything but the interest in art". Quesego, like its predecessor Ultra (1922), attracted young writers who did not accept the aestheticism of the older generation, but at the same time, they could embrace the Romantic "art for art's sake" ideal. However, the young Fenno-Swedish modernist writers never formed any cohesive group. When Edith Södergran wrote visionary poems in Raivola, coping with the inevitability of death, Enckell was devoted to beauty and his observations of nature.
Vårens Cistern (1931) presented Enckell's 'matchstick poems' equivalent of the Japanese haiku, in which he apprehended specifically the Finnish pastoral scene. In Tonbrädet (1935) the tone is resigned: "On earth happiness is prohibited" - the theme of human fate became central in later works.
Because of a medical disqualification, Enckell never served in the army. His fascination with Greek and Roman myths in the middle of WWII was seen in his verse collection Lutad över brunnen (1942), in which he occasionally uses classical meters. This work expressed alarm about the fate of man and humanistic ideals, which he further examined in his Greek-inspired plays Orpheus och Eurydike (1938), and Agamemnon (1949).
In Andedräkt a koppar (1946) Enckell analyzed modern poetry itself. 'O prång av mellanord' (o steps of words between) was about language in which he joined Gunnar Björling who constantly struggled with the limits of language: "One finds nothing in life, / if one cannot find those words, / made transparent by that / which the spirit has in common with all and everything." When Björling solved the problem by attacking the language, Enckell relied on mystic unity with the world.
Enckell became first known as an essayist and theorist, who analyzed modernist poetical language. Typical of his own work was the precision of language and lucidity. According to Enckell, in the old lyrics, the pictures appealed to our sight and the rhythm to our emotions, pictures in modernist lyrics appeal directly to our sight and hearing. Between the years 1929 and 1965 he made several journeys to France and Italy and had art exhibitions among others in Stockholm (1929, 1940, 1944), Oslo (1929, 1936), Moscow (1934-35), in Berlin, Düsseldorf and Hamburg (1935), in Milano and Rome (1935) and in Göteborg (1940), where later in 1956 Enckell also edited the art magazine Paletten. His paintings and other works of art are in several collections in Finland and abroad.
While Enckell's early collections poems were characterized by self-assurance and uninhibited expression, his work began to reflect the fragility of human existence after a personal crisis in the late 1930s. From Tornbrädet Enckell started to use images from antiquity; he became a cool, meditative observer, strongly self-critical. His classical studies also gave birth to such verse plays as Orfeus och Eurydike, Iokasta (1939), Hekuba (1952), and Mordet på Kiron (1954). These dramas set in the Ancient world drew from his personal inner experience, but at the same time, they expressed collective fears of the time.
In the late 1930s, Enckell's cosmic views changed into microcosmic explorations: small animals and insects started to appear in his poems. As a theorist of modernism Enckell clarified that these images were meant to capture the reader with their fast movements before disappearing. After World War II Enckell gained fame in Sweden with Andedräkt av koppar (1946) and Nike flyr vindens klädnad (1947). Its introduction was written by the Swedish modernist poet Erik Lindegren. The title referred to the headless statue of the Nike of Samothrace, discovered in 1863.
As a prosaist, Enckell generalized the results of his self-examination as common reactions. He was above-all an aesthetician, who cultivated an objective approach to his subjects in his confessional prose. In Tillblivelse (1929), a collection of his early essays, and Ljusdunkel (1930), its title referring to the Italian word chiaroscuro, he examined loneliness, shyness, and alienation. Heidi Runeberg, his first wife, Encell portrayed in Ett porträtt (1931). Landskapet med den dubbla skuggan (1933) contained a sketch of playground cruelty, 'The Japanese Children'.
His last collection, Flyende spegel, which included diarylike travel impressions, appeared posthumously in 1974.
In 1941, Enckell was arrested and confined in a mental hospital for a short period of time after stabbing with a knife Oscar Parland, who had begun a relationship with his wife, the critic and translator Heidi Runeberg. Parland did not press charges against him. Enckell then had a short-lived marriage with the painter Alice Kaira (1943-46). His third wife was the painter Aina Dagny Maria Erikson.