Authors

Finnish · 1901–1933

Uuno Kailas

Uuno Kailas was a Finnish lyric poet of extraordinary intensity who is considered the most important Finnish poet of the 1920s. Diagnosed with tuberculosis at twenty-one, his poetry is saturated with awareness of mortality and the urgency of existence. His collections — Tuuli ja tähkä (1922) and others — combine lyric beauty with existential darkness in a voice uniquely his own. He died at thirty-two, leaving a small but concentrated body of verse that has remained central to Finnish poetry.