HEIDENSTAM, KARL GUSTAF VERNER von. - Swedish poet and writer, b. at Olshammar on 6 July 1859, d. at Stockholm on 20 May 1940. To him is largely due the rise in Sweden of a new romanticism. In 1916 he received the Nobel Prize. Interested in the figurative arts (he was also a mediocre painter), he found in the Orient, which he visited in his early youth, the field most suited to his joy of observation and his unrestrained imagination; only later would he contrast the colours and splendour of the East with the meagre and bare beauty of his native North.
Aristocratic by birth and sentiment, nationalist by instinct and by lived experience of other countries, he rose from being a singer of beauty and the senses to the position of a prophet of his country, tempered by a religious, almost mystical conception of life. Among his works are the collection of poems *Valfart och vandringsår* (*Years of Pilgrimage and Travel*), 1880, and the novels *Endymion* (1889) and *Hans Alienus* (1892). With the satire *Pepitas bröllop* (*The Wedding of Pepita*), written in 1890 together with O. Levertin, he practically won his battle against naturalism. His art is fully mature in *Dikter* (*Poems*), 1883: the poet now knows that the only possible salvation lies in his native land; in the brief collection *Ett folk* (*A People*) he takes an active part in the political problems of the moment. From now on, the living and real source of his inspiration are 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 Birgitta pilgrimfärd* [*The Pilgrimage of St. Bridget*], 1901), and the first medieval Swede is revived in the vast novel *Folkungaträdet* (*The Tree of the Folkungs*), 1905–1907. In *Nya dikter* (*New Poems*), 1913, the poet has attained an inner harmony, confident that he has faith for whom many things are sacred. His fine autobiography (*När kastanjerna blommade* [*When the Chestnuts Bloomed*]) and the *Sista dikter* (*Last Poems*) were published posthumously (1941).