Icelandic poet and novelist, best known as a poet of humanity.

Stefánsson came of a cultured yeoman family and was brought up with a love for his homeland, its literature, and its folklore. He frequently journeyed abroad but lived most of his life in the town of Akureyri, where he was a librarian (1925–52). He wrote a powerful novel, Sólon Islandus (1940), about a daydreaming 19th-century vagabond whose intellectual ambitions are smothered by society; a successful play, Gullna hlidid (1941; The Golden Gate, 1967, in Fire and Ice: Three Icelandic Plays); and other prose works, but they are overshadowed by his verse.

Stefánsson's early poetry, including most of his folk themes and love lyrics, appeared in Svartar fjadrir (1919; “Black Feathers”), Kvædi (1922; “Poems”), Kvedjur (1924; “Greetings”), and Ný Kvædi (1929; “New Poems”), which were combined and published as a collected volume in 1930. His later poetry—darkening in social satire, reformatory zeal against capitalism and organized religion, and despair over the war—was published as I byggdum (1933; “Among Human Habitations”), Ad nordan (1936; “From the North”), Ný kvædabók (1947; “A New Book of Poems”), and the posthumous Sídustu ljó (1966; “Last Poems”). His lyrics often have the delicacy of a cradle song; yet his heroic verse shows the virility of an epic poet.