Orð og tunga - 26.04.2018, Side 50

Orð og tunga 20 (2018), 39–66. © Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum
fræðum, Reykjavík.
Kendra Willson
Splitting the atom
Lexical creativity and the image of the
Icelandic atom poets
1 Introduction
New Icelandic compound words formed with the fi rst element atóm-
‘atom’ in the mid-twentieth century refl ect aspects of the popular im-
age in Icelandic culture of poetic modernism and other modernist
and avant-garde artistic movements, as well as the ethos of the early
Cold War. Because free verse and poetic modernism emerged in Ice-
land only in the 1940s, the “atom” became a symbol of this movement
and aesthetic – through the resonance of a coining by Nobel author
Halldór Laxness, adopted by the poets through various metaphorical
connections to their aesthetics and political concerns. Refl ections of
the nuclear proliferation of the early Cold War infi ltrated diff erent
areas of culture widely in Europe and North America, with connota-
tions of technical achievement and promise coupled with existential
fear (see e.g. Paju 2004). However, the explicit connection between the
atom bomb and a literary movement is specifi c to Iceland. Some of
the atom poets’ work thematicized issues of the nuclear age, but the
connotations of “atom” pertain less to the content of the poetry than
its form, in metaphors that Eysteinn Þorvaldsson (1980:104) explores
– paring poetic language down to its basic elements, as well as “ex-
ploding” the conventions of poetry.
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