In 1807, when in his seventeenth year, he founded at Uppsala an artistic society, called the Aurora League, the members of which included V. F. Palmblad, Anders Abraham Grafström, Samuel Hedborn (died 1849), and other youths whose names were destined to take a foremost rank in the literature of their generation.

Still, in 1810 there began to appear a journal, Fosforos, edited by Atterbom, which lasted for three years and finds a place in classic Swedish literature.

It consisted entirely of poetry and aesthetic-polemical essays; it introduced the study of the newly arisen Romantic school of Germany, and formed a vehicle for the early works, not of Atterbom only, but of Hammerskijld, Dahlgren, Palmblad and others.

[1] Among Atterbom's independent works the most celebrated is Lycksalighetens Ö (The Fortunate Island), a romantic drama of extraordinary beauty, published in 1823.

As a purely lyrical poet he has not been excelled in Sweden, but his more ambitious works are injured by his weakness for allegory and symbolism, and his consistent adoption of the mannerisms of Tieck and Novalis.