Bilden som byggsten : Om Lars Gustafssons poetik och lyriska praktik

Sammanfattning: The aim of this thesis is to reconstruct and describe the implicit poetic theory behind the lyrical practice of the Swedish poet Lars Gustafsson. The overarching inquiry concerns the importance of the poetic image, and the questions posed deals with the author’s views on his own poetry and on his own lyrical method. The first chapter discuss the author’s initial sayings on the production of poems, and includes his views on the ability of the poem as well as on its limitations. Gustafsson appears in this regard as a pronounced pragmatic, which is shown with examples from his first book of poems Ballongfararna (The Balloonists, 1962). In the second and third chapters aspects of the author’s polarity between reason and mystique are discussed. In spite of an explicit emphasis on the intellectual, the author’s poems, though very factual in style, is shown to contain a visionary aim. The forth chapter takes its start in the author’s declared turn away from the pragmatic and into an objective view on the ontology of the poem, and the change in strategy connected with this shift are explored. As a whole the thesis demonstrate how Gustafsson throughout his career has attempted to bridge the shortcomings of the Modernist lyric, and the poetic image, that has been essential in this quest, appears all pervading as a cognitive instrument.