With Gunnar Ekelöf, he belonged to the most prominent exponents of the lyric modernism flourishing in his country, especially from the 1940s.

His poetry books include the surreal "shattered sonnets" in mannen utan väg ("The Man Without a Way", title without capital M; 1942, a breakthrough work of its generation and a central work in fyrtiotalism literature), Sviter ("Suites", 1947) and Vinteroffer ("Winter Sacrifice", 1954).

He translated the works of T. S. Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke, Graham Greene, Saint-John Perse, Dylan Thomas, William Faulkner, Paul Claudel and many others into Swedish.

Lindegren wrote the libretto for Karl-Birger Blomdahl's space opera Aniara among others.

[1] Between 1948 and 1950 he led the literary magazine Prisma, one of the most lavish and broad ever produced in Sweden, aiming to "gauge the state of the arts in the present".