He has been compared to Shakespeare, Beethoven, Mozart, and Hogarth, but his gift, using elegantly rococo classical references in comic contrast to sordid drinking and prostitution—at once regretted and celebrated in song—is unique.

The general theme is drinking, but the songs "most ingeniously"[3] combine words and music to express feelings and moods ranging from humorous to elegiac, romantic to satirical.

Bellman's songs continue to be performed and recorded by musicians from Scandinavia and in other languages, including English, French, German, Italian, and Russian.

Carl Michael's parents were Johan Arndt Bellman, a civil servant, and Catharina Hermonia, daughter of the priest of the local Maria parish.

[5] As the banking career was not working out – and as trainees were (after a period with a relaxed regime) again required to sit an exam, for which Bellman was ill-equipped – he took a break in 1758, going to Uppsala University, where Linnaeus was professor of botany.

[6] Bellman returned to the bank job, and seems quickly to have fallen into financial difficulty: "a jungle of debts, sureties and bondsmen began to proliferate around him.

Then his fortunes improved: someone found him a job, first in the Office of Manufactures, then in the Customs, and he was able once again to live happily in Stockholm, observing the people of the city, with at least a modest salary.

A genre which 'had no model and can have no successors' (Kellgren), these songs were to grow swiftly in number until they made up the great work on which Bellman's reputation as a poet chiefly rests.

He finally managed to obtain the permission in 1774, but soon discovered that the cost of printing, especially as he was determined to publish the sheet music alongside the text, was prohibitive given his ruinous finances, and he was forced to put off his plans.

[1] In 1783, Bellman brought out The Temple of Bacchus (Bacchi Tempel), perhaps hoping to establish his reputation as a poet, rather than the merry entertainer that he was in fact known as at the time; but he always stood out in people's minds as unique, a different kind of writer and performer.

The settings of his songs reflect life in 18th-century Stockholm, but often refer to Greek and Roman mythological characters such as the goddess of love, Venus (or her Swedish equivalent, Fröja), Neptune and his retinue of water-nymphs, the love-god Cupid, the ferryman Charon and Bacchus, the god of wine and pleasure.

Ulla Winblad was widely believed to have been closely based on Maria Kristina Kiellström, though the real woman, a silk worker once arrested for alleged prostitution, was not the ideal romantic figure of Bellman's songs.

Similarly, the ornate and civilized minuet melody of "Ack du min Moder" (Alas, thou my mother) contrasts with the text: Fredman is lying with a hangover in the gutter outside a tavern, complaining bitterly about life.

They may be drinking songs in name, but in structure they are tightly woven into a precise metre, situating the "frenzied bacchanalia within a strict and decorous rococo frame.

"[21] The musicologist James Massengale writes that the technique of reusing tunes in musical parody had already been overused and had fallen into disrepute by Bellman's time, just as his subject matter was initially looked down on.

He refers to the result ... not as 'parody' but as 'den muçiska Poesien', [musical poetry] ...Bellman's exceptional case, then, is that of a poetic genius who worked with an art form which in the hands of others was usually insignificant.

He was able to go into a room apart and behind a half-open door mimic twenty or thirty people at the same time, a crowd pushing its way on to one of the Djurgården ferries, perhaps, or the uproarious atmosphere of a seaman's tavern.

The illusion was so startling, his listeners could have sworn a mob of 'shoe-polishers, customs spies, seamen ... coalmen, washerwomen ... herring packers, tailors and bird-catchers' had burst into the next room.

Although Fredman's Epistles was neither exactly literature as understood by the academy, nor meeting the standards of elegant taste, the poet and critic Johan Henric Kellgren and the King ensured that Bellman won the prize.

Like the English portrait painter, Bellman drew detailed pictures of his time in his songs, not so much of life at court as of ordinary people's everyday.

[28]Paul Britten Austin says instead simply that:[2] Bellman is unique among great poets, I think, in that virtually his entire opus is conceived to music.

[2]Bellman's informal Bacchi Orden (Order of Bacchus) was replaced in the 1770s by the more structured Bacchanalian society Par Bricole, which still exists in the 21st century.

[31] Bellman's poetry continued to be read and sung throughout the 19th century, contrary to the widespread belief among researchers that he was largely forgotten during this period.

Figures such as Fredman, Ulla Winblad and Movitz, as well as Bellman himself were painted on tavern walls and memorabilia such as plates, beer tankards and hipflasks.

[41] In 2020, Uppsala stadsteater and Västmanlands Teater created Bellman 2.0, a costumed theatre concert, directed by Nikolaj Cederholm with Fredman's Epistles and Fredman's Songs arranged by Kåre Bjerkø for guitar, electric guitar, double bass, cello, tuba, clarinet, drumkit and percussion, keyboards, accordion, and five voices.

Bellman's songs have been translated and recorded in Icelandic (by Bubbi), Italian, French, Finnish (for instance by Vesa-Matti Loiri), Russian, Chuvash and Yiddish.

[4] Books in English with translations of Bellman's work have been written by Charles Wharton Stork in 1917,[47] Hendrik Willem van Loon in 1939,[48] Paul Britten Austin,[49][50] and the historian Michael Roberts.

The place, beside the beach at Långholm, was in Bellman's time called Lilla Sjötullen (The Small Lake-Customs House) where farmers from Lake Mälaren had to pay a toll on the goods they were taking to market in Stockholm's Gamla stan.