When the Danish poet, painter, and bon vivant Holger Drachmann died in 1908, his death marked the end of an era in more ways than one. His passing symbolically signalled the end of the romantic and late-romantic tradition in Danish art and culture, one that had dominated most of the nineteenth century. From the 1870s onwards, new literary and cultural currents gradually came to the fore and gathered momentum. Just as in many other parts of the world, remarkable progress was made in science, industry, transportation, and communication, as well as in the cultural realm. Commonly this period in Scandinavian cultural history is framed as the breakthrough of modernity, starting in the early 1870s and resulting, at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the advent of modern democracy in politics as well as modernism in art. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, literature played an essential role in the proliferation of new ideas and the notion of modernity, not least due to widespread censorship and deadlock in the Danish political arena.

In this relatively short and intense time frame, which constitutes a watershed in Scandinavian cultural history, Drachmann was one of the most prominent and versatile authors in Denmark. His impressive body of work comprises more than 60 books and hundreds of separate publications in almost every imaginable literary genre. Clearly Drachmann was aware of the latest trends in literature and constantly on the lookout for opportunities to maintain his position centre stage. The versatility of his oeuvre however, simultaneously gives rise to the impression that his work lacks both ‘gravity’ and generic focus as all his best-known works were not only written in different genres, but also across different literary periods. Furthermore, none of these principal works – the poem ‘Engelske Socialister’ (‘English Socialists’, 1871), the play Der var Engang (Once Upon a Time, 1885), which includes the famous ‘Midsummer Song’ and the novel Forskrevet (Signed Away, 1890) – made any waves outside Scandinavia, and relatively few translations appeared.

In Danish literary history Drachmann tends to be regarded primarily as a ‘national’ author with an intermediary and transitional role, functioning as a steppingstone for those who looked for new artistic forms of expression that would be more in tune with the rapid metamorphosis of art and society.