Together with Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847-1885) and Johannes V. Jensen (1873-1950), Sophus Claussen (1865-1931) introduced modernism into Danish poetry. Whereas Jacobsen’s poems are redolent of decadence and eccentric aestheticism, and whereas in his poems Johannes V. Jensen transformed a tradition deriving from Walt Whitmann into the first real free verse in Danish, it is late 19th-century French poetry that makes itself felt behind both Sophus Claussen’s poems and prose.
Sophus Claussen created a poetry that at once seeks to apprehend the world and language, and which along with this twofold sensuality aspires to expression in a figurative language. It is a poetry that experiences the world as one, but which can only do so by placing a sharp distinction between work and world. Finally, it is an oeuvre in which the person of the typical sensitive, reflective poet is dissolved in allegorical reduplications and in the impersonal and supra-personal logic of the poetical language itself.
Sophus Claussen’s first publication was Naturbørn (Nature’s Children) in 1887, but it was only with the next collection of poems, Pilefløjter (Willow Pipes) (1899) that he really made a mark on Danish poetry. Pilefløjter consists of nature, travel and love poems. In motif, they vary between Danish and foreign, and in theme between ideal, erotic love and the boundaries laid down for it by morality.
In Pilefløjter, Sophus Claussen carries the language of Romantic poetry, and especially the poetic diction of his exemplar Emil Aarestrup, towards new boundaries – and beyond them in an oeuvre, the beauty of which sounds strange and alien in the midst of all the recognisable elements it contains.
The idyllic starting point of Pilefløjter is replaced by dissonance in Djævlerier (Diableries). With inspiration from Charles Baudelaire, a challenge is thrown down to the beautiful and the good by a series of complex mythological female figures. Behind them can be discerned a criticism of civilisation which, with Nietzschean undertones, views the established order as true evil and apparent evil as a mighty liberating force. Whereas the poetry of Pilefløjter is based on literary symbols, many of the poems in Djævlerier are narrative and in need of figurative decoding. In other words, they are allegorical.
In the subsequent collections of poems, of which the most important are Danske Vers (Danish Poems) (1912), Fabler (Fables) ( 1917) and Heroica (Heroica) (1925), the inverted utopia of Djævlerier is rejected, and the poems seek a never fully achieved balance between a gentler view and a profound distrust of the reconciliatory and at times magical ability that Sophus Claussen at the same time attributes to poetry. Hermetic labyrinths of images, which he calls fables, and visionary hexameter poems alternate with musical reveries and quite short poems on death and silence. Stable image structures are dissolved and replaced by more fragmented forms.
Alongside the poems, Sophus Claussen wrote works couched in lively symbolist prose. The novels Unge Bander (Young Gangs) (1894), Kitty (1895) and Fortællingen om Rosen (The Story of the Rose) (1927) remain within the range of motifs and themes found in the poems in Pilefløjter. The travel accounts Antonius i Paris (Antonius in Paris) (1896) and Valfart (Pilgrimmage) (1896) are written in a lyrical prose interspersed at times with prose poems and inspired by Sophus Claussen’s meeting with Parisian literary circles in the 1890s. This meeting is described in Antonius i Paris, the fragmented form of which reflects the experience of modern-day Paris. At the same time the book again tells of a schism and a gulf between poetry and eroticism. In the more idyllic and tender register of Valfart we find an ambiguous consummation of the erotic utopia that is the driving force behind much of the oeuvre. Valfart takes place in Italy.
In 1918 and 1927 Sophus Claussen published two books of assorted prose pieces, Løvetandsfnug (Dandelion Clocks) and Foraarstaler (Spring Addresses). Fiction, autobiography and poetic theory are here linked and together draw up a kind of inventory of work and life. Poetologically, the books denote a move away from 19th-century autonomous poetics, where the work is a place where reality is transformed into ideality, to a more open form in which the work is more in the nature of an intermediate link for the world. This intermediate link is then on the other hand conceived as all the more magical.
Sophus Claussen’s poems and prose are always products of the senses without being devoid of thought; they are playful but also incisive; they have breadth without losing their focus. They seem to be driven by an irony that is always pointing to something else, something that does not coincide with what we have long believed we have understood. They are in constant movement between metaphysics and sense perception, between the attempt to understand all things and then the things themselves, including the words, which of course are also a kind of thing.
