ABSTRACT
The author concerns the renowned balladeer, poet and entertainer Carl Michael Bellman (1740-95). The aim of sentimental poetry was to convey emotion to the reader in an immediate and expressive way without resorting to metaphors and unencumbered by neo-classical rules. Furthermore, graveyards and mourning, rather than compassion and sympathy for the misery of the living, were the focus for Reuterholm's displays of sentimentality. Reuterholm had turned sentimentality into brinksman-ship, resulting in the abrupt termination of long friendships for pragmatic and political reasons. While the sentimentality of friendship was politically profitable, Reuterholm's deep involvement in mysticism and Freemasonry fostered a sense of divine mission and political narcissism that would be his downfall. In one of Bellman's royalist poems, Gustav III is described sitting on his throne in his first year as a regent, witnessing dissension and political discord among the people with a mixture of tenderness and tears in his eyes a rhetorical legitimization of the royal coup detat.
