Poetry
Sång öfver grefve Gustaf Philip Creutz
Not translated into English
Frans Michael Franzén · 1797
Synopsis
A song in memory of Count Gustaf Philip Creutz, born in Finland and died in 1785, a poet, before becoming a diplomat, of an idyll long held to be the most admired in the Swedish language. The first half of the poem evokes the poverty of Swedish poetry in past centuries, in bold and colourful images; the second enthusiastically celebrates Creutz's work, in which the spirit of the North merges with Greek form.
Context
Composed on his return from a two-year journey through a Europe marked by the Revolution, it was crowned in the autumn of 1797. But the prize came with a condition: that the text be rewritten in a more classical direction. The author complied, while writing to Rosenstein that the academy seemed to expect a philosophical poetry and that he found in his head an image rather than a thought. What has been read since 1802, the date at which the academy's proceedings printed it, is the revised version, much longer; the seventeen trochaic stanzas after Schiller that had been crowned were printed only later. His poetic invention almost stopped there, and he turned to hymns.
Who it is for
A few pages of verse, in Swedish. It helps to know who the dead man was: a Finnish count turned diplomat, whose idylls had enchanted Sweden thirty years earlier.
Prizes and reception
Grand prize for poetry awarded by the Swedish Academy for 1797; Swedish literary history counts it among its most remarkable poems.