The Atom Poets were a group of Icelandic modernist poets, the five most prominent of which were Einar Bragi, Hannes Sigfússon, Jón Óskar, Sigfús Daðason and Stefán Hörður Grímsson,[1] who all began their careers in the 1940s and 1950s.
The term was coined by Halldór Laxness, a rather conservative Icelandic writer and critic, in his 1948 novel The Atom Station--"the atom poet in the novel is a bad poet and a less than sympathetic character." The name, at first used pejoratively, stuck, and came to mean all poetry written in a non-traditional manner.[2] In contrast, the atom poets' work is more complex and introspective, requiring more effort from the reader. Influenced by French surrealism (Bragi had translated some of their texts into Icelandic),[3] these poets revolutionized Icelandic poetry, replacing the "old poetic traditions of meter, alliteration, and stylized 'poetic' diction" with "free verse and other features of the 'international' style."[4][5]
The Atom Poets did not have a manifesto and were never an organized movement, though some of them collaborated on the editorial board of the "main forum for Icelandic modernists," Birtingur, founded in 1953 by Einar Bragi.[2]