In spring 1892 the Stockholm literary magazine Ord och bild commissioned Swedish poet Gustaf Fröding (1860–1911) with a translation of Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (1816). At the time, Fröding was an accomplished poet and an experienced translator of Romantic poetry from English, German, and French. However, Fröding lamented in a letter to his editor that in “Hymn” he had encountered an unexpected problem with rendering Shelley’s poetry of meteorological form into Swedish. This is peculiar as Fröding’s own poetic compositions, original and translations alike, are deeply preoccupied with meteorology. Taking its outset in Fröding’s struggle with the translation, this essay investigates weather in “Hymn,” arguing that what had puzzled Fröding was a mode of meteorological representation idiosyncratic to Shelley. The essay suggests that it is precisely through these idiosyncratic meteorological representations that Shelley develops discourses of French materialist and British skeptical and empirical philosophy. This development culminates in an “aesthetics of weather,” expressive of Shelley’s radical conceptions of the social and physical world. The essay concludes that Fröding’s pronounced struggle and the variation in semantic content of his version of the poem reveal what is really the meteorologically precise poetic form of an aesthetics of weather in “Hymn.”

Carl-Ludwig Conning explores a previously undocumented aspect of the Swedish reception of Percy Shelley. In 1892, the literary critic Hellen Lindgren published the first major Swedish analysis of Shelley along with Fröding’s translation of Shelley’s ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’. Conning’s chapter investigates the cultural-historical context for Lindgren’s introduction of Shelley to Swedish readers and reads Lindgren’s account of Shelley alongside the literary manifestos of the Swedish writers Fröding and von Heidenstam. Conning shows how Lindgren found in Shelley a particularly compelling integration of idealism and materialism, thereby offering a potential resolution to a dichotomy which was much debated in Swedish literature at the time as part of an ongoing transition from national Romanticism toward Naturalism. Conning also provides a full English translation of Lindgren’s essay.