The Full Utteredness of the Unsaid : The conflict of poetics and poetry in the works of Gunnar Björling

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.