Tove Ditlevsenīs life and work were a rather public affair. Right from her debut in 1939, through her four marriages to her death by suicide in 1976, she knew how to work the media - and they her. Time after time the poet showed us her drawn and haggard face in close-up, never once attempting to hide from the world her nightmarish life and the lengths to which she had gone to keep panic and despair at armīs length.
Tove Ditlevsen believed that this public exposure of her personal life was an unavoidable part of her artistic expression, and even went so far as to emphasise that exhibitionism was, quite simply, the actual motive for poetry: "To write is to surrender yourself. Otherwise, you cannot call it art. You can cover things up to a certain extent, but in truth you always write about yourself."
Ditlevsenīs poetic inspiration came from the poor child in the drab working-class suburbs of the big city. Nothing we experience later in life will ever erase the memories of childhood, as Tove Ditlevsen once said and wrote.
There is a feeling in the poems of the first collection that Tove Ditlevsen acquired a sense of existing outside reality at a very early stage in life. The poems reflect the sense of insecurity and alienation felt by the girl and the young woman towards her parents, her surroundings, and the world at large.
Ditlevsen found a way of dealing with this disharmony by creating an imaginary curtain - a veil of words and dreams - which she could pull across and hide behind when reality came a little too close for comfort. It was a strategy that Ditlevsen was to use throughout her adult life. The childīs fear of reality and the ability to withdraw into an inner world remained with her.
The poetical maturation of Tove Ditlevsenīs writing closely follows her passage of personal development. From her debut in 1939, through seven anthologies, an even greater number of novels, newspaper articles and correspondence, to the poems she left behind which were published two years after her suicide in 1976, the trend is clear: there is a steady and relentless progression from young girl and grown woman to motherhood, marriage, divorce, loneliness, fear, chaos, destruction and sudden death.
And that is where the great rift in Tove Ditlevsenīs life and work appears: On the one side was her longing for middle-class peace and security, on the other the creeping fear of routine and the emptiness of daily life. This gave her poetry a distinctive bittersweet voice, which subtly and effectively manages to blend tradition and modernism, realism and fantasy.
The poems and novels from Ditlevsenīs final years are told in the many voices of a woman suffering from schizophrenia. As one narrator says: "My scattered conscience drifts along on a wave of words". The female protagonist sees herself by turns from the outside and from the inside. One moment she is full of lies, the next she is completely trustworthy. And all the time she is adventurous, enticing and prophetic like a fortune-teller.
This modernistic aspect of Ditlevsenīs poetry is a suggestive and, at times, Kafkaesque journey into a shadowy world where the fine line between normality and insanity has been erased. It is brilliantly done, and so shockingly consistent that one is reminded of a Ditlevsen quote in a magazine from the beginning of the 1960s, in which she hinted that the psychotic patient is not someone who has lost their mind, but someone that has lost everything but their mind - and therefore have an astonishing insight into their own persona. As Ditlevsen said: "I allow myself my madness - and I accept it. When you are in the middle of an inner or outer crisis, you cannot create anything. You donīt sit down and write when the whole world is falling down around your ears. But afterwards you digest the experiences". The majority of Tove Ditlevsenīs poems from 1939-1976 were intimate analyses, written when she had returned home to question normality after voluntarily or forcibly spending time amongst the insane. Her writing came out of her suffering, and she admitted that she found little inspiration in happiness. Few in Danish literature have been able to follow her act.
