Karlfeldt, Erik Axel

Karlfeldt, Erik Axel (ā`rĭk äk`səl kärl`fĕlt), 1864–1931, Swedish lyric poet. His work is representative of neoromanticism in the 1890s. Themes of nature, love, and life in the province of Dalarna predominate in Songs of the Wilderness and of Love (1895), Fridolin's Ballads (1898), and other collections. He was posthumously awarded the 1931 Nobel Prize in Literature, which he had refused in his lifetime. Selected poems were translated as Arcadia Borealis (1938).

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Karlfeldt, Erik Axel

(born July 20, 1864, Folkärna, Swed.—died April 8, 1931, Stockholm) Swedish poet. His strong ties to the peasant culture of his rural homeland remained a dominant influence on his writing all his life. His essentially regional, tradition-bound poems, some published in English in Arcadia Borealis (1938), were very popular. He was elected to the Swedish Academy in 1904 and made its permanent secretary in 1912. He refused the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1918 but was awarded it posthumously in 1931.