Songs about Iron and of Iron : Henry Parland and the Poetic Potential of Technology

The fascination with technology, the cult of speed and the positive vision of a city of concrete, glass and steel are modernist themes of futurist heritage, all central to the understanding of a facet of the avant-gardes of the twentieth century. Henry Parland (1908-1930), one of the prime movers of the Finland-Swedish modernist movement, was an acute observer both of technologies of perception (photography, cinematography, telephony) and of technologies of speed (trains, street cars, automobiles, motorcycles). Several articles and many poems in his production focus, often playfully, on a highly mechanised world. This paper explores how Parland elevated technological inventions and products of industrialisation to become the subjects of his poetry and artistic prose, and discusses their function in his literary output. The writer’s good-humoured, tongue-in-cheek technophilia, is seen as a strikingly unique alternative to an angst-ridden technophobia and the aggressive macchinolatriaof the Futurists.