Copenhagen into the Avant-garde: Literary Dreams and Nightmares about a City

The spread of literary avant-garde in Denmark had an intense and meaningful moment in the late 1910s and during the 1920s. This was initially thanks, above all, to the authors publishing on the review «Klingen» (“The Blade”, 1917-1920), who introduced and diffused the new attitudes of Futurism and Expressionism with all their disruptive and desecrating force even if related to the fin de siècle recent literary innovations. One of the characterising aspects of this new poetry was the (sometimes violent) celebration of speed, technology, progress and in general of the metropolis as a universe of life, chances and modernity, as well as confusion and contradictions. Such attitudes can be found in some Danish avant-garde poetry works: Emil Bønnelycke’s Asfaltens Sange (1918) and Københavnske Poesier (1927), Tom Kristensen’s Fribytterdrømme (1920) and Jens August Schade’s Sjov i Danmark (1928). After considering the great expansion of Copenhagen and its literary representation in the late 19th century, this paper focuses on Asfaltens Sange and Sjov i Danmark as very different but both experimental expressions of the relationship with modernity and urban life in the early 20th century, finally highlighting some aspects of the peculiar avant-garde experiences in Scandinavian literature.