Einar Benediktsson was one of the most distinctive and in many ways one of the most independent poets of Iceland at the beginning of the twentieth century. His poems are often said to be inaccessible and abstract, and yet few poets are more quoted in Iceland, and lines from his poetry have become aphorisms that belong to the daily speech of many Icelanders.

At the close of his life, Einar was quite a controversial man, and in some ways well ahead of his time. The sense of controversy arises from his distinctive, forceful personality and from his active involvement in a brand of nationalist politics that envisaged the economic and industrial development of an independent Iceland. Yet, as much as Einar Benediktsson loved Iceland and its language, of which he was a master, he sojourned abroad, chiefly in different countries of Europe, for more than a decade of...