Emil Aarestrup was a poet unappreciated in his own time. During his lifetime he published only one collection--Digte (Poems, 1838). Any hope for the success of the book was shattered by the critics' silence, and only forty copies were sold. In 1863, seven years after his death, his friend poet Christian Winther published Aarestrup's Efterladte Digte (Posthumous Poems). The collection comprises poems written before 1838 as well as the relatively few he wrote thereafter. Aarestrup's openly erotic use of language particularly repulsed the arbiters of taste. Peter Andreas Heiberg, a prominent critic, privately referred to Aarestrup's book as "svineri" (filth). Aarestrup achieved some redress when the scholar P. L. Møller, in his Kritiske Skizzer (Critical Sketches, 1847), wrote the first introduction to Aarestrup's work. Georg Brandes, however, was the first critic to place Aarestrup in a literary-historical context--even though Aarestrup continued to be devalued as an "offensive" writer.

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