Oscar Ivar Levertin was a Swedish

Sweden

Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

 poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

, critic

Critic

A critic is anyone who expresses a value judgement. Informally, criticism is a common aspect of all human expression and need not necessarily imply skilled or accurate expressions of judgement. Critical judgements, good or bad, may be positive , negative , or balanced...

 and literary historian. Levertin was a dominant voice of the Swedish cultural scene from 1897, when he started writing influential high-profile essays and reviews in the daily paper Svenska Dagbladet

Svenska Dagbladet

Svenska Dagbladet is a daily newspaper in Sweden. The first issue appeared on 18 December 1884. Svenska Dagbladet is published in Stockholm and provides coverage of national and international news as well as local coverage of the Greater Stockholm region...

. From 1899 until his early death in 1906 he also occupied the first Chair of literary history at the University of Stockholm, in which role he published extensive studies, particularly in Swedish 18th century literature.

In his own short story collections in the 1880s, Levertin first aligned himself with the Naturalist

Naturalism (literature)

Naturalism was a literary movement taking place from the 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character...

 school of fiction of which August Strindberg

August Strindberg

Johan August Strindberg was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg's career spanned four decades, during which time he wrote over 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography,...

 was the most prominent member. In 1888, however, the previously unheard Swedish romantic

Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

 poetic voice of Verner von Heidenstam

Verner von Heidenstam

Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam was a Swedish poet and novelist, a laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1916. He was a member of the Swedish Academy from 1912...

's Vallfart och vandringsår changed Levertin's stylistic ideals. Levertin and Heidenstam published together a pamphlet attacking the Naturalist style in 1890, and even though Levertin was never to abandon his scientific and materialist view of history (something that sets him off from other poets of his generation), his literary energies were thenceforth channelled into poetry of a romantic, exotic

Exotic

Exotic can mean:*In mathematics:**Exotic R4 - differentiable manifold homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to the Euclidean space R4**Exotic sphere - differentiable manifold homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to the ordinary sphere*In physics:...

 and historical character. Together with Heidenstam's work, Levertin's first collection of poetry, Legender och visor (Legends and Songs) (1891), sparked an 1890s Swedish fashion for historical, particularly "medieval", literature. Unlike Heidenstam's and much other Swedish poetry of the 1890s, Legender och visor is free from Swedish nationalism

Nationalism

Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...

, drawing on many Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

an as well as Middle Eastern sources. This volume remains highly regarded today, though no longer widely read. Poems from it, including the ballad "Flores och Blanzeflor", remained set texts in Swedish schools into the 1970s.

External links

• Listen to a free MP3 recording of Wilhelm Stenhammars music to Levertins poem Vårnatt with Hemavans Sommarkör 2006.