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Edith Södergran was born in the Finnish village Raivola on April 4, 1892. Finns, Swedes and Russians lived in close proximity in this village, fifty kilometers northwest of St. Petersburg on the Baltic sea. The violence of World Wars I and II swept over Raivola three times, and much has changed since the poetess was a child there. Her home was burned down, her tombstone was stolen, and many of the inhabitants were dispersed after many generations of residence there.

The serene natural environment one encounters in her poetry was the scene of exploding grenades, machine-gun fire and terrible bloodshed. Edith had heard machine-guns sputtering in Raivola in 1918 during the mutual slaughter of the red and white guards. Battle-weary Swedish-speaking officers were quartered in the home of Edith and her widowed mother after a decisive battle.

Twenty years after her death, nearby St. Petersburg (then called Leningrad), where she had gone to a private girls’ school, was bombarded by German cannons. The entire Baltic region underwent epic changes as a result of the epic violence. (She and her mother were in St. Petersburg in 1917 during the tumult of the revolution.)

Edith Södergran's poems reflect her inner exile from the civilization that unleashed such wasteful violence and carnage, inner exile that is the traditional lot of the poet. One of the last poems she wrote before her death from tuberculosis reveals a longing for landet som icke är , ”the land that is not,” an echo of her ultimate detachment from the chaotic human society around her.

The Land that Is Not can be likened to the Homeland of Nothing Whatsoever of the ancient Chinese sage Chuang Tzu. Such a view can give rise to accusations of escapism, apathy and indifference. But in Edith Södergran’s case, it can be seen as spiritual strength of the highest order. Her clairvoyance gave her deep contact with what she called the Mystery. For Chuang Tzu and the other taoist sages it was Tao – the Way. Edith described the Mystery in a manner similar to the taoist descriptions of the Way: ”Mystery, I recognize you, I, the anti-mystic, the enemy of ghosts./ Mysteries have no clear boundaries, mysteries have no utterable name.” (”Instinct")

The beloved natural landscape around her she called her ”garden”, a forest of maples, birches, elms and spruce with a lake below where she liked to sunbathe in nakedness. The reader may be wondering why this major poet of the Swedish language was a native of Finland, in a village where mostly Finnish was spoken. From the time of Karl XII’s conquests around the Baltic in the 18th century there has been a Swedish-speaking community on the Baltic coast of Finland. Many Finnish-speaking Finns as well are fluent speakers of Swedish today, although the two languages are not at all related linguistically, as are Swedish and Norwegian. Swedes in Sweden immediately recognize the thick accent of Finland’s Swedes, which was the accent of Edith Södergran. One can imagine how she sounded listening to the actress Stina Ekblad, herself a Finland-Swede, recite Södergran’s verses in Stockholm.”). Read more here:http://www.syukhtun.net/edith.html