En gruvkarls lott: om upplysningstendenser i 1720- och 1750-talens bröllopsdiktning

Abstract

The article discusses new tendencies in eighteenth-century wedding poetry, tendencies which can briefly be described in terms of a backlash against fantastic storytelling and an orientation towards more realistic descriptions, often coupled with a deliberative rather than demonstrative rhetorical approach. The shift is demonstrated first through a broad survey of themes in Swedish wedding poetry from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and then through analyses focusing on two poems of the new kind which thematize the groom's profession through descriptions of mining work astonishingly ‘realistic' for the time. The main explanation for this is that there were no venerated models to follow when writing about these themes, as well as the fact that the poems were not written for public but for private use. The poems are then compared with other poems from the same mining area, but with learned themes more typical of the wedding poetry of the time. It is then concluded that Swedish poets still had a long way to go to be able to incorporate such ‘realistic' features into the conception of what ‘poetry' was considered to look like.