Magnus Nilsson: “The Aesthetics and Politics of Work in the Poetry of Stig Sjödin”

This article analyses one of the most prominent motifs in Swedish working-class writer Stig Sjödin’s (1917-1993) poetry, namely that of work. The main argument is that Sjödin’s attitudes toward work were conditioned both by his Marxist worldview, and by the different audiences for which he was writing. The poetry that he published in the labor-movement press aimed at creating class consciousness among workers, and presented work both as something marked by oppression and injustice, and as a source of pride. In his poetry collections, he presented industrial labor to an audience outide the working class, with the aim of making them aware of the plight of the working class. Here, work was presented in a more univocally negative way than in the poetry priented in the labor-movement press.