The Working-Class Poetry of Tove Ditlevsen

Not long after divorcing her fourth husband, Victor Andreasen, Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen placed a personal ad in the newspaper of which he was then editor-in-chief. ‘Interests’, she wrote in Ekstra Bladet, ‘[include] literature, theatre, people and domestic bliss.’ Lists are a recursive strategy in Ditlevsen’s poetry, as are her fantasies of familial and domestic bliss. Love, she claims throughout The Copenhagen Trilogy (1967-1971), is salvation, but also a drug. The thin line between the two is more fully realized in Gift (Dependency, 1971), a confessional account of her marriages, love affairs and addiction; the book’s Danish title means both ‘married’ and ‘poison’. But it’s in her poems that she most artfully transposes absence and presence, the void between having and wanting. Her poem ‘Marriage’ (1955) conjures a sobering diagnosis of conjugal life: ‘unknowingly coerced / into a lawful death of love’.

There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die (2025) – a new translation of Ditlevsen’s poetry that spans her entire, 30-year writing career – tells of a life afflicted by loneliness. Born into a working-class family in the Vesterbro neighbourhood of Copenhagen in 1917, Ditlevsen had her first poem published at the age of just 20 in Wild Wheat. Within three years, she had married one of the journal’s editors, Viggo F. Møller, who was 30 years her senior, and published her first and much-lauded collection, From a Girl’s Mind (1939), the works from which open There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die. Although Ditlevsen initially attributed her early success to her first husband, she later claimed that it ‘probably wasn’t necessary to marry him to move up in the world, but no one had ever told me that a girl could make something of her own’.

Better known by English readers for her prose, Ditlevsen’s poetry has been often dismissed as anachronistic. Discussing her work on the Danish TV show Store Danskere in 2005, for instance, the author Klaus Rifbjerg called her poems ‘well crafted and well formulated’ but ‘quite old fashioned!’ Guided by the edicts of formal verse, her early work has a cadence that feels – even at her time of writing – decidedly twee. Take, for instance, ‘Eve’ (1942), in which the eponymous narrator cries to a star ‘so sadly – / no more will these lips be kissed, these lips that kissed / gladly’. But for Ditlevsen, a poet committed to writing working-class literature, this was intentional. Refusing to yield to the elitist bent of high modernism, her work was popular exactly because of its sincerity. She was, above all else, a writer willing to lay herself completely bare.

A cynical impulse might surmise that the recent revival of interest in Ditlevsen’s work from publishers is predicated on her commercial viability. Her work has frequently been compared to that of Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf on account of the fact that she tragically took her own life at the age of 58 – a detail this publication’s editors feel necessary to mention in her biography after a brief summary of her staggering career. In Harper’s, critic Lauren Oyler also took issue with Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s marketing of their 2021 reissue of The Copenhagen Trilogy, noting, ‘The work is important; the fate is merely a fact’.

Less common, however, are the important discussions of class that are addressed in the foreword by fellow Danish poet Olga Ravn, who observes that Ditlevsen was not just a working-class writer but a ‘worker’s writer’ of proletarian literature to be taken seriously. ‘The revolutionary subject, the worker,’ Ravn writes, ‘has always been presumed to be a man at the factory. But when women bring children into the world, children who grow up to go to the factory, work is being done.’

Insofar as her feminist politics informed her body of work, Ditlevsen wrote devastatingly about the thankless, gendered injunctions of being a wife and mother. She describes the strange alienation of housework and childrearing; she condemns the family, an institution for which, she discerns in her poem ‘The Family’ (1969), ‘there is no cure’, its members knowing her too well to love her and too little to care for her company. Allusions to her experiences of domestic abuse and botched, illegal abortions punctuate the poems with a visceral melancholy. In this way, Ravn also draws attention to the fact that reception to Ditlevsen’s work frequently underplays, even erases, its radicality in favour of relegating it to the sketchy, vague category of ‘women’s writing’. To flatten Ditlevsen’s work in such terms is to undermine not only its place in feminist literature but also the singularity of her voice.

Tragedy may have played its part in Ditlevsen’s life – but so did empathy. What gives light and levity to There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die is the author’s solidarity with the subjects about which she wrote. Her extraordinary social realism portrayed all walks of life: the poor and working-class, sex workers, widows, addicts, mothers and children. There are moments of consummate beauty throughout the collection; a young boy’s love for his grandmother; the narrator of ‘Childhood Street’ (1942) recalling the ‘rowdy and rough’ games she used to play with her brother. In compelling us to take in these characters, Ditlevsen reminds us of the quiet, unremarkable lives that shape the world. It’s truly a great shame that she died believing no one cared for her poems. But, as she observed in Barndom (Childhood, 1967), ‘I have to write them because it dulls the sorrow and longing in my heart.’

Tove Ditlevsen's There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die (translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell) is published by Penguin Classics in the UK 

_{Main image: Portrait of Tove Ditlevsen. Photograph and courtesy: Alamo}