ABSTRACT
In 1890 at the age of nineteen, Vilhelm Krag startled and delighted the Norwegian literary world with a poem he wrote while a university student. The poem, Fandango, written on Persian themes, seemed to herald a new literary age, a turning away from the prevailing realistic and naturalistic themes of which the reading public had grown weary. Musical language and sensuous imagery enlivened the poem, and its air of ‘gentle melancholy and sweet sorrow made it a distinctly and almost polemically anti-naturalist statement’. Although he was a prolific writer of poems, plays, and novels until the end of his life, Krag did not fulfill the overwrought expectations of his early work. However, he left an enduring legacy, a body of work devoted to depictions of his beloved southern Norway.
