SODERGRAN, EDITH (IRENE)

born April 4, 1892, St. Petersburg, Russia died June 24, 1923, Raivola, Fin. Swedish-Finnish poet whose expressionistic work influenced a generation of Finnish and Swedish writers. Her family moved to Finnish Raivola when Sdergran was three months old. Educated at a German school in St. Petersburg, where the family maintained a winter home, she contracted tuberculosis at 16 and never fully recovered her health. Her first book, Dikter (1916; Poems), expressed shifting moods of melancholy and joy in a free verse form that was indebted to the Symbolist poets. This collection inaugurated the Swedish-Finnish modernist movement, which looked to German Expressionism and Russian Futurism for inspiration. Sdergran wrote six volumes of poetry, and a volume of her letters was published in 1955.