Edith Sodergran

'When she died in poverty at 31, Edith SA¶dergran had been dismissed as a mad, megalomaniac aristocrat by most of her Finnish contemporaries. Today she is regarded as Finland's greatest modern poet. Her poems - written in Swedish - are intensely visionary, and have been compared with Rimbaud's, yet they also show deep afi¬nities with Russian poetry, with the work of Blok, Mayakovsky and Severyanin in particular.Born in 1892 of a Finno-Swedish family, Edith SA¶dergran grew up in Raivola, a village on the Russian border, but was educated at a German school in St. Petersburg. Her early influences were Goethe and Heine, and she wrote first in German. The driving force of Edith SA¶dergran's matu.