TS Eliot said ”April is the cruelest month” 1922 & August Strindberg said ”Av alla í¥rstider í¤r ví¥ren erkí¤nt den mest obehagliga” 1877. Hmm. Loosely translated it means that «of all the seasons, Spring is acknowledged to be the most cruelest»
Wasteland by TS Eliot and Frí¥n Fjí¤rdingen och Svartbí¤cken by August Strindberg are perhaps two works of writing which have nothing in common except these seemingly strings of texts.
I would like to think they do. This rejection of the coming of the spring in TS Eliot and Strindberg is enough for me to entertain the idea that TS Eliot might have read Strindberg. & he apparently did at some point acknowledge that he did since he purportedly wrote a letter to the Swedish newspaper Svensk Dagbladet in 1949 or says Evert Sprinchorn.
Did Eliot read Strindberg? He was in Germany in 1914 and 1915, when Strindberg was the most discussed dramatist. The younger generation regarded him as the incarnation of the modern conscience. In 1949, on the occasion of Strindberg’s centenary, Eliot sent a letter to the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, in which he said that he had got to know some of Strindberg’s plays when he was young and impressionable.
Is that sufficient evidence for it? I mean, that one of the most famous poems of the English language of recent whose byline is «April is the cruelest month» is actually influenced by Swedish author August Strindberg?
Strindberg exchanged letters with the likes of Nietzche. A CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN NIETZSCHE AND STRINDBERG https://archive.org/stream/jstor-25120062/25120062_djvu.txt
Amazing what one sentence can lead to ….