Instead, he devoted himself to teaching, both at schools and at the University of Copenhagen: among his students were the future poet Johannes Weltzer and Poul Hartling, later Prime Minister of Denmark.

His views on the latter were conservative and nationalistic, promoting what he saw as authentic, masculine Danish aesthetics – represented by the ballet master August Bournonville – against modernist, liberalising innovations from Europe and the United States.

He wrote critically of the American dancers Isadora Duncan and Loïe Fuller, but was later an advocate of the Russian choreographer Michel Fokine.

[6] In 1898, Jørgensen visited Verona, Venice and Siena with his brother Einar, where he studied renaissance art, particularly the works of Lorenzo Lotto and Antonio da Correggio.

[7] Jørgensen received his Master of Arts degree from Copenhagen in 1902, submitting a thesis in which he argued for the single authorship of the Homeric poems,[8] based on Book 13 of the Odyssey.

[c] Following his graduation from Copenhagen, Jørgensen travelled to Berlin, where he spent the 1902–1903 academic year studying Homeric poetry under the philologists Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and Hermann Alexander Diels.

[14] In a letter of November 1902 to Heiberg, Jørgensen called himself "Wilamowitz-intoxicated", having "almost daily" studied his writings over several years,[15] though later that month he described one of Wilamowitz's seminars as "a complete farce" and an exercise in "throwing a discus in [his] own glass house".

[1] Jørgensen travelled to Athens in the spring of 1903, funded by a government stipendium of 450 kroner (equivalent to 35,000 kr., or $5080, in 2022),[18] with his fellow Copenhagen student, the future archaeologist Frederik Poulsen [da].

This principle became known as Jørgensen's law,[26] and the classicist Ruth Scodel described it in 1998 as the "standard analysis of ... the rules that govern human speech about the gods".

[38] In March 1905, Jørgensen wrote to Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen that, following a period of "mental depression" caused by the affair with the Greek Society, he was working on "a little article" about ballet.

[1] He asserted the importance of the Danish ballet master August Bournonville while criticising the innovations introduced into European dance by Isadora Duncan.

[42] He condemned the Art Nouveau- and symbolism-influenced style of Loïe Fuller, another American who, like Duncan, performed in Denmark in 1905, calling it "quasi-philosophical experiments".

[44] The ballet scholar Karen Vedel has linked Jørgensen's opposition to Duncan, and the liberalising ideas of the Modern Breakthrough he felt she represented, to the ideology of the Danish national conservative movement.

In particular, she draws attention to Jørgensen's promotion of what he saw as distinctively "Danish" ballet, and his characterisation of this as masculine and Dionysian, in contrast to his portrayal of Duncan's style as foreign, unartistic and iconoclastic.

The literary scholar Jørgen Erik Nielsen later praised the essay as displaying an extensive knowledge both of Dickens and of related literature and criticism.

[50] Jørgensen once identified the subject-matter of two history paintings by the sixteenth-century artist Salvator Rosa, held by the National Gallery of Denmark, by reference to an obscure verse of late-antique Latin poetry.

[4] Poulsen, who knew Jørgensen in Copenhagen and Berlin and accompanied him to Athens, described him as "a quiet, reticent student" and a "remarkable man", whom he compared with Socrates.

[i][54] Poul Hartling described Jørgensen as looking like "what a professor ... should look like according to the clichés: scruffy-stubble full beard, thin-rimmed glasses, knee flaps and button-downs".