[citation needed] Edith Irene Södergran was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, into a middle-class Swedish speaking family.

When Edith was just a few months old, the Södergrans moved to the village of Raivola on the Karelian Isthmus where her grandfather, Gabriel Holmroos, bought a house for them.

The school was situated opposite The Winter Palace, which enabled Edith to experience the troubles in Tsarist Russia at close range.

She was almost certainly in the city on Bloody Sunday in January 1905 when the Tsarist guards opened fire on thousands of starving citizens who had gathered to protest the lack of food.

Though her first real encounter with a more structured questioning of the gender dynamics and the 'new woman' is believed to have taken place during her time in a sanatorium in Switzerland.

[5] Some biographers, including Gunnar Tideström, have claimed that Helena had found a foster sister of a similar age to Edith, named Singa.

[6] During 1908, Edith appears to have made a decision to make Swedish the main language of her writings and her poems in German suddenly stopped.

[9] Some years earlier she had published a poem, Hoppet ("The Hope"), in a membership newsletter for the Swedish Liberal Party in Helsingfors and began to come into contact with Finland-Swedish authors.

Barely a month after the result, she was admitted to Nummela sanatorium, the same hospital where her father had been a patient before he passed on, meaning that Edith was never entirely comfortable there.

After May 1912 no more tuberculosis bacteria were shown to be in her lungs[5] although she was not free from the sickness and knew that she must be watchful of her diet and rest for several hours every day.

Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain, which admittedly was written after the war but is set in a sanatorium during these years, gives a picture of the intellectually lively atmosphere.

Her debut book Dikter ("Poems"), which came out in the autumn of 1916, gained no great notice, even if a few critics were slightly perplexed – Södergran was already using associative free verse and describing selected details instead of entire landscapes.

After the October Revolution in 1917, Edith and her mother's economic assets were suddenly rendered worthless since they had been placed in Ukrainian securities;[9] and soon after, from the spring of 1918, the Karelian Isthmus became a war zone.

She tried to discuss her poetry in a notorious letter to the editor in the Helsinki newspaper Dagens Press on New Year's Eve 1918 in order to clear up some of her intentions with the paradoxical visions in her new book.

With the next collection of poems, Framtidens skugga ("The Shadow of the Future") (whose original title was "Köttets mysterier" ("Mysteries of the Flesh")),[10] the visions that had exhorted Södergran culminate in poems speaking of a renewed world after the wars and catastrophes that now ravage the Earth – Raivola was, as stated earlier, a war zone in 1918, and even later Edith was able to hear gunfire from her kitchen window.

[citation needed] Despite the visionary overtones, Södergran was during this period an atheist,[11] and according to neighbours and friends she was entirely capable of differentiating between her own self and the shimmering queens and prophets she took as characters in her poetry.

Generally, when she gave space for a more positive belief in nature and religious spirituality in her poems, it meant that she felt a release from some of the specific expectations that had upheld her in a dreary existence – a waiting and "charging-up" that could not be endured indefinitely – but also an incipient repudiation of, and retreat from, her Nietzschean vision of the future.

From the summer of 1920 on, she abandoned her poetry until August 1922; during the autumn and winter she wrote her final poems, stimulated by the review Ultra; the short-lived review, started by Elmer Diktonius, Hagar Olsson and other young writers, was the first publication in Finland to embrace literary modernism, and it hailed Edith as a pioneering genius and printed her new poems.

Edith Södergran was a trailblazer within modernist Swedish poetry and had many followers, including, amongst others, Elmer Diktonius (1896–1961), Gunnar Björling (1887–1960) and Rabbe Enckell (1903–74).

In Sweden she became an important guide for a number of poets, including Gunnar Ekelöf and Karin Boye, and her poems are now translated into Russian, Spanish, Chinese and other languages.

Fourteen years after Södergran's death, the author Jarl Hemmer said that her poetry surely had meaning but did not believe that it would be appreciated by people in general.

[12] Of her poems, some of the most well-known are Svart eller vitt ("Black or White"), Ingenting ("Nothing"), Min barndoms träd ("My Childhood's Trees") and Landet som icke är ("The Land which is not").

In her middle-period poems, we often meet a commanding figure – a prophet, a princess, a saint, or simply an imposing "I" projecting their will, visions and feelings.

But Södergran herself was enough of a realist to know that these personae are not simply to be conflated with her own private self – she obliquely refers to that distinction several times in her letters to Hagar Olsson, and many people who knew her have attested that she was aware of it – so the ego in her production can be a role that she will visit and investigate, as in the poems Rosenaltaret ("The Rose Altar"), Stormen ("The Storm") (there are two poems with this title, both of them with a visionary slant), Skaparegestalter ("Creator Figures"), Vad är mitt hemland ("What Is My Homeland?

In Den stora trädgården ("The Big Garden), a beautiful 1920 poem about the mission of artists and the new age, she states openly that "Naked we walk in shredded clothes ..." and that artists have no outward power and should not aim to have any: The poem was originally sent to Hagar Olsson in an April 1920 letter where Edith recounts flu, abject poverty, and a humiliating attempt to sell some old underwear to get money.

Gunnar Tideström has commented that "few documents of her hand give such a striking idea of her day-to-day self", and that "she admits that life is cruel and that she will perish if this goes on for much longer – but it is not a self-pitying letter; it glows with light".

After her death, Landet som icke är ("The Land which Is Not") was released, containing a collection of poems that had been rejected from her earlier volumes.

Vaxdukshäftet (written 1907–09), from her teenage years in St. Petersburg and Raivola, was released in Finland in 1961 by Olof Enckell (with the title "Ungdomsdikter 1907–1909" (Childhood poems 1907–1909).

Junge Schwedischsprachige lyrik in Finnland is an anthology that Södergran also worked on during 1921–22 and which she hoped to have published in Germany in order to be able to launch young Swedish language Finnish poetry there.