The disparity in their works, however, would eventually defeat their partnership. From among these Young Socialists and anarchists Martinson took a wife in 1929, and over the next decade the two established their reputations: Moa Martinson, through her radical political engagement and her novels Harry, in poems and books of travel whose fresh language made the natural world of his harsh experience a place of genius and joy. Once cured of his illness, he could find no work, but begged on the streets of Gothenburg in an unreformed Sweden murmuring with pre-revolutionary havenots and causes enough to energize them. Down with black-lung disease, a common affliction of stokers, he came ashore for good in 1927.

At sixteen, after a decade of such abasement, he sought liberation and dignity on the sea, but found little of either. His father dead, his mother fled to America, he and his sisters became wards of the parish in south Sweden, fanned out for their labor to the lowest bidder. his undamaged trust in life, which later would show itself more clearly and give him his supremacy, his power to overcome all resistance as if it were a game and self-evident.” Martinson’s joviality, as Lundkvist implies, rose out of desperate beginnings.

Introduction The poet Artur Lundkvist recalls Harry Martinson for “the open heart of his naiveté.

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