One of the best known modern poetic works in Icelandic is the cycle "Time and Water" (TÌminn og vatni, 14 poems in 1948, extended to 21 poems in 1956) by Steinn Steinarr ( 1908-1958). 

In the composition of this work at least two layers may be discerned; first great imagery and colours in the poems Steinn made before his stay in Sweden in the summer of 1945, but after that comes what has made this work so fascinating to many people , that its imagery, very visual, is in my opinion quite incomprehensible. At the same time the reader can sense a structure in the work, a concentration of the different elements towards a common goal, that can not be expressed directlyñ if I so may paraphrase Kant's definition of the nature of a work of art ("Zweckm'assigkeit ohne Zweck"). These vivid images are clearly surrealism as it was formed around 1920 in Paris. It is a particularly radical kind of Modernism. In a metaphor are combined widely disparate things, that still must have something important in common. Also, the movement from source to target should be towards something important, to cite the leader of the surrealists, AndrÈ Breton (in Signe ascendant, 1947). Within these boundaries there is great variety. But, whereas before, for example in symbolism, phenomena of nature were brought close tio the reader by personifying them og metaphorizing them into something in people's nearest surroundings; surrealism prefers the opposite direction, to make familiar things seem strange and unfamiliar. This is increasingly done in the latter version of "Time and water", from what was the case in the first version.
The surrealist method is clearly useed in a few poems by HalldÛr Laxness, in 1927, but Steinn has appropriated this method from "mannen utan v'ag" (1940) by the Swedish poet Erik Lindegren, who in turn seems to have been directly inspired by a cycle of sonnets by Dylan Thomas: "Altarwise by owllight" (1936).
Steinn Steinarr uses this method not only in "Time and water", but also in (just as many) poems from his last years, that here have been compared with that cycle, As opposed to other poems discussed on this homepage (Romanticism and Symbolism), it was seldom possible to group the metaphors into analogical on one hand, and based on some kind of similarity on the other. This is simply due to the large general disparity between source and target. And to follow AndrÈ Breton's cited definition, that "the movement from source to target should be towards something important.", this taxes the imagination of the readers to such an extent, that there is no room for such interpretations here. Peter Hallberg said about the metaphors of "mannen utan v'ag" that they are full of imagery, yet this could never be observed (in Diktens bildspråk, 1984). This fits very well the metaphors of these poems by Steinn. As examples we might roughly translate some: "The water flies on transparent wings againnst its own resistance", "on a rectangled surface between the circle and the cone grows the flower of death", and so on. Generally, most of the metaphors in Stein's last poems join incompatible things, and that is surely the main characteristic of these poems. Abstracts are likened to light, sound, smell, house and mountain. Feelings and light are likened to flowers, thoughts to horses and to melted wax. A dream, days, darkness, night, voice and thoughts are likened to birds. Darkness is also likened to a wheel, the sound of wings to light, a hand to a bird and to a bomb, and so on. But these disparate metaphors become even more strange by being contained in descriptions filled with imagery.
As to personifications, half of them are of abstracts in "mannen utan v'ag", but only a third of the personifications in Stein's poems, natural phenomena are more prominent, like many of his Icelandic predecessors. But contrary to the tradition of making abstracts look and behave like familiar human beings, or rather like the gods of Greek-Roman myths, here there is a great distance between source and target, and the behaviour of Stein's personifications is strange, like Lindegren's "mannen utan v'ag", and indeed like HalldÛr Laxness' poems of the twenties.
The metaphors in Lindegrens and Steins works mostly join abstractions to concrete things, and almost as often concrete things to other concrete things. The method of joining is mostly having one of the words in genitive in "mannen utan v‰g" , but Steinn uses similes just as much, and many other kinds of metaphors. But there is no difference other than formal, they all join equally disparate things, mostly to make abstractions and feelings seem concrete. "The flower of death", the white light of my sorrow" "in a depth of twenty fathoms my belief and love slept like a two-coloured flower" "My sorrow glittered in your shallow sea like yellow amber."
As we saw, it was HalldÛr Laxness who brought surrealism to Iceland in the mid 1920's. Then it was short-lived, but two decades later Steinn Steinarr lifted the banner again with a radical renewal of Icelandic poetry. Obviously, he was much more influenced by Erik Lindegren's "mannen utan v'ag" than by Laxness. And indeed, Lindegren was much more of a radical modernist than was his pupil Steinn.