As solo songs, Grieg set more poems by John Paulsen than of any other poet: seventeen, two more than either Andersen or Vinje, three more than Bjornson or Garborg and six more than Ibsen. Paulsen was born in 1851 and is regarded as a minor poet, frequently not even mentioned in books on Norwegian literature. He was a friend of Grieg from their early days in Bergen, the recipient of many letters from the composer and the author of several volumes of memoirs. Grieg and Paulsen spent the summer of 1876 together, travelling first to Bavaria for the first Wagner festival in Bayreuth, where they heard performances of the complete Ring cycle, described by Grieg to Bjornson as ‘the most remarkable work of our whole cultural history’. The two then went to the Tyrol at Ibsen's invitation, to visit the writer at Gossensass. That Grieg regarded Paulsen as a close friend may be seen from a letter to the poet of 1876: ‘There is nothing nicer than a friend's letter! My imagination is rarely in such a stir as when I write to a friend! And you are such a one to me, I feel that while I sit here writing. Not because I start the letter with: Dear friend! – but because you are what you are.’

Paulsen was a native of Bergen, and in his youth was admired by Ibsen as a poet and dramatist. His poetry, however, is largely weak and sentimental, and lacks ‘the authentic stamp of personal experience’which had so marked the Ibsen poems. On occasion, more so in the op. 58 album than in the op. 26, one cannot help but feel that Grieg chose Paulsen's poems for the sake of their friendship rather than from any artistic motives. He obviously sensed something of Paulsen's weaknesses, however, for just after he had completed the op. 26 songs, Grieg wrote to him: ‘In you I see so much of myself from earlier days. Therefore I can say to you: acquire steel, steel, steel! And now you ask: where do I get it from? There is just one terrible answer: It is bought with the life-blood. God knows that I speak from experience.’ And in 1881, after seeing a new book of Paulsen's, he wrote, ‘You have so much in both your personality and your talent that reminds me of H. C. Andersen. Your fund of naivety will only come into its own in the world of fairy tales. Beware!’ But Paulsen was never to attain the heights that might have been expected from his early poetry and plays, and he is now chiefly known through Grieg's settings and for his memoirs, which contain some entertaining anecdotes of contemporary figures.