Poems as fields of facts and means of persuasion

Two major examples of modern Danish factual poetry

Abstract

The article presents a general definition of ‘factual poetry’ and discusses the contributions of two Danish poets to this kind of literature during the 1970s and 1980s. For Knud Sørensen (1928-2022), writing and publishing poems containing factual information like place names and statistics was used as a means of political expression in a period in which traditional Danish rural culture and agriculture had come under pressure from industrialization and urbanization, leaving farmers with a sense of having become homeless and useless. For Thorkild Bjørnvig (1918-2004), his environmental poetry, published in three independent volumes 1975, 1981, and 1990, was a tool in his resistance to technology and international capitalist society as well as a weapon in a collective struggle to defend the rights of our fellow creatures, all the animals of the earth, from an ecological standpoint. Both Sørensen and Bjørnvig also became famous for their other works in diverse literary genres, and they were not the only Danish or Scandinavian poets to write factual poetry in the late 20th century, but as they both grasped the possibilities of forming a social point of view, wielding public political influence through poetry, the article concentrates upon them.