Letters of Blood and Other Works in English

This collection brings together for the first time select works in English by the major Swedish modernist poet and critic Göran Printz-Påhlson. It was Printz-Påhlson who introduced poetic modernism to Scandinavia, and his essays and poems delve deeply into English, American, and continental modernist traditions.

As well as Letters of Blood, the collection includes the full text of "The Words of the Tribe", a major statement on modern poetics, in which Printz-Påhlson explores the significance of primitivism in Romanticism and Modernism, and the nature of metaphor and literary materialism. The collection also includes essays on style, irony, realism, and the relationship between historical drama and historical fiction, as well as studies of American poetry. Printz-Påhlson’s poetry in English continues to explore these themes by different, often surprisingly innovative, means.

Göran Printz-Påhlson will go down in history as the author of some classic poems… and one of Sweden's most learned, innovative and sharp-witted literary critics.
— The Independent

Since publication this book has been viewed over 600 times. Last updated March 2013.

Title: Letters of Blood and Other Works in English
Author: Printz-Påhlson, Göran
Editor: Archambeau, Robert
Publication date: December 2011
Size: 6.14” x 9.21” | 234mm x 156mm
Pages: 210
BIC classification codes: DCF (poetry), DSA (literary theory), 1DNS (Sweden)



Letters of Blood and Other Works in English, by Göran Printz-Påhlson, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Noncommercial - No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Foreword
Elinor Shaffer

Inbetween: Locating Göran Printz-Påhlson
Robert Archambeau

The Meaning of Place: Some Notes on Göran Printz-Påhlson
Lars-Håkan Svensson

The Words of the Tribe: Primitivism, Reductionism, and Materialism in Modern Poetics

1. Linguistic Primitivism in Modernism and Romanticism

2. Linguistic Reductionism in Poetry Criticism

3. The Material Word: From Imagism to New Criticism to Intertextualism

4. The Polity of Metaphor and the Purity of Diction

Other Prose

Style, Irony, Metaphor and Meaning

Realism as Negation

Historical Drama and Historical Fiction: The Example of Stindberg

The Canon of Literary Modernism: A Note on Abstraction in the Poetry of Erik Lindegren

The Tradition of Contemporary Swedish Poetry

Kierkegaard the Poet

Surface and Accident: John Ashbery

The Voyages of John Matthias

Letters of Blood: Poems
Part One:

My Interview with I.A. Richards

Generation

Televisiondreamroutines

The Longest-Running Show on Television

The Enormous Comics

Poem Unnamed

Botchuana

Part Two:

Aelius Lamia: Tanka for Robert Hass

Odradek

Turning Machine

Broendal

Two Prose Poems

Sir Charles Babbage Returns to Trinity College

Man-Made Monster Surreptitiously Regarding Idyllic Scene

Joe Hill in Prison

Remember the Rosenbergs

When Beaumont and Tocqueville First Visited Sing-Sing

Three Baroque Elegies from Gradiva

Part Three:

Comedians

Songs of Dock Boggs

In the Style of Scott Skinner

Acrobats on the Radio

To John at Summer Solstice, Before His Return

Part Four:

The Green-Ey’d Monster

Select Bibliography

A Note on the Text

Robert Archambeau is a poet and critic whose books include the study Laureates and
Heretics: Six Careers in American Poetry (University of Notre Dame Press) and the
poetry collection Home and Variations (Salt Publishing). He has edited several
books, including Word Play Place: Essays on the Poetry of John Matthias (Ohio
University Press) and The &Now Awards: The Best Innovative Writing (&NOW Books).
His writing has appearing in Poetry, Boston Review, PN Review, Pleiades, Chicago
Review, and many other journals, and he has received grants and awards from the
Academy of American Poets, the Swedish Academy, and other organizations. He has
taught at Lund University in Sweden, and is Professor of English at Lake Forest
College, Illinois.

"It seems to me that people (like me) know very little about Scandinavian modernism, but this volume of writings by the Swedish poet, translator, and critic Göran Printz-Påhlson may help to improve matters."