It is impossible to categorize this author, whose name by the way is pronounced "Loveh" and not "Love", because he was both a romantic poet, feminist, realist, composer, social critic and traveler. Some of his views are surprisingly modern, after two centuires his thoughts about the equality of men and women are sometimes more modern than the ones we have today. Born in 1793 and dead in 1866, he found the time to write quite a few books and poems. Among them were some that dealt with his radical views on society and politics. These books made the church and state condemn him and call him a dangerous revolutionary. However, he still maintained power with his writings, and he is counted as one of the foremost of the swedish social reformers in the nineteenth century. His enemies tried all the harder to bring him low, and this might have been accomplished when he was accused of having tried to murder a shady business acquaintance with arsenic. If he was guilty or not will never be known, but he did panic and flee to the United States, where he spent most of his latter years. There he took a new identity and married, and lived a life of obscurity in self-imposed exile. In 1865 he returned to Europe, took another identity and died in Germany the following year. The following texts are displays of his romantic, nature loving side. "Night of the poet" is a prose poem telling of art's and an artist's relation to life. "Ormus and Ariman" is an excerpt from the novel by the same name, which is a retelling of an ancient persian god-myth. Ormus is a personification of rigid rule-following, whereas Ariman is the image of free flowing creativity. Both the texts have been translated by myself. I'll include them as soon as time permits.
Night of the poetFrom : Ormus and Ariman