HEIDENSTAM, KARL GUSTAF VERNER von. – Swedish poet and writer, b. at Olshammar on 6 July 1859, d. in Stockholm on 20 May 1940. He was largely responsible for the emergence of a new Romanticism in Sweden. In 1916 he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Interested in the visual arts (he was also a mediocre painter), he found in the East, which he visited in his early youth, the field best suited to his joy of observation and to his imagination, which brooked no restraints: only later would he set against the colours and splendour of the Orient the sparse, austere beauty of his native North.
Aristocratic by birth and sentiment, nationalist by instinct and by his lived experience of other countries, from a singer of beauty and the senses he rose over the years to the position of national bard, tempered by his religious, almost humanistic conception of life. His poetry collection Vallfart och vandringsår (“Years of Pilgrimage and Travel,” 1880) and the novels Endymion (1889) and Hans Alienus (1892) are remembered among his works. With the satire Pepitas bröllop (“Pepita’s Wedding”), written in 1890 together with O. Levertin, he effectively won his battle against naturalism. His art had fully matured in Dikter (“Poems,” 1885): the poet by then knew that the only possible salvation lay in his native land; in the brief collection Ett folk (“A People”), he took an active part in the political issues of the moment. From then on, the most vital and authentic sources of inspiration for him were the history of his people and the nature of his land: Charles XII is at the centre of the novel Karolinerna (“The Soldiers of Charles,” 1897–98); St. Bridget is followed on her pilgrimage to Rome (Heliga Birgittas pilgrimfärd, “The Pilgrimage of St. Bridget,” 1901), and the early Swedish Middle Ages rise again in the extensive novel Folkungaträdet (“The Tree of the Folkungs,” 1905–1907). In Nya dikter (“New Poems,” 1915), the poet attained an inner harmony of his own, certain that “he has faith for whom many things are sacred.”
His fine autobiography (När kastanjerna blommade, “When the Chestnut Trees Blossomed”) and the Sista dikter (“Last Poems”) were published posthumously (1941).