The Poetry
Steinn Steinarr is sometimes considered the first important Icelandic modernist poet, but he also had a good command of traditional Icelandic poetics. His poetry has aged surprisingly well. In fact it is in many ways more timely today than it was when it was written. One reason may be that his favorite theme, the struggle of the eternal loner/outsider against the entrenched tyranny of corrupt power, rings at least as true now as it did back in the 1930s and '40s. Another reason may be that Steinn’s works are a spin-off of one of the world’s great literary traditions: the poetry of the mediaeval Icelandic skalds, famed for their complex and riddling style, although Steinn was also one of the first Icelandic poets to move away from the dominance of strict meter and alliteration.
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Famous quotes containing the word poetry:
“The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)