ABSTRACT
In the first half of the nineteenth century Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger (1779-1850) won the undisputed position as Denmark’s national prince of poets, whose work set the standard for what was understood as desirable in poetry in Denmark for several generations. With a unique linguistic musicality, he experimented with verse forms and rhyme patterns, which liberated theretofore unknown rhythmic resources of sound in the Danish language. He thus created a supple, sonorous, and sensual artistic language, which at the same time through a return to words and morphologies from previous epochs, especially the Danish ballad of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, endowed the language with a poetic loftiness which was free from pathos and self-importance. This special Oehlenschlägerian style was an outstanding tool for the expression of the mild and harmony-searching tendency which is so characteristic of the Danish form of Romantic idealism, and it thus became the literary artistic language, which was adopted in a more or less modified form by virtually everyone who expressed themselves poetically in Danish in the entire nineteenth century and much of the twentieth. This is also true of Søren Kierkegaard, who, at the end of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript mentions “the teacher of the beautiful art of poetry and its secrets of language and taste, because such an initiate we do have, and I know, and I hope I shall forget neither him nor what I owe to him.”1 The most notable thing in this recognition of inheritance and debt is that Oehlenschläger’s name is not even mentioned; so unquestioned was his position that Kierkegaard could assume that every contemporary reader would know whom he was talking about.
