Haavikko's poetry may be viewed as a two-pronged attack on the style and content of Finnish poetry before 1950. However, while the details of many poems are peculiar to Finland, most of Haavikko's poems are international in their modern style and attack on positivism and national romanticism, and on the irrationality of human perception.

The nine-poem cycle "Winter Palace," published in 1959, is one of the landmarks of modern Finnish literature, and firmly established Haavikko as the most original voice in postwar Finnish poetry. The poem is the culmination of many of the themes of the first decade of his writing….

["Winter Palace"] uses the modern associative technique, described in the opening lines as:

                  Side by side:
                  The images.
                  To have them tell you….

And, apropos of this technique, the poet also questions the tyranny of language and syntax, viewing them as one of the many conceptual categories which severely...