Sweden

Scandinavian country in Northern Europe.
==Stevens's Opinion on Swedish Poetry==
At one point, noting that the heat in midsummer is suffocating, Stevens expressed an idle wish to José Rodríguez Feo for a cottage in Sweden “on a lake surrounded by dark green forests in which all the trees talk Swedish” (Letters 644). Still, Stevens seems to have relatively little interest in Sweden as a place. For example, a Swedish visitor (who “reeked” of Swedish poetry) gave Stevens a book of Swedish songs and a book of translated Swedish poetry. Stevens comments 
Now I have not the slightest desire to sing Swedish songs correctly or incorrectly and at the moment a Swedish anthology is the last thing in the world that I should ever look at. This is simply typical of the sort of thing that runs one ragged. (Letters 712)
=="Lions in Sweden"==
Rather, “Sweden” seems to work for Stevens as a metaphor for the “wintry” imagination. The poem “Lions in Sweden” offers a meditation on majestic images that affect us—the foremost majestic image being the lion.  A lion, therefore, is one of those “sovereign images,” hungered for by soul. It is allegedly both immutable and everlasting—which even men “in Sweden” acknowledge. Still, even these majestic, sovereign images seem to suffer some kind of defect. The poem concludes with the speaker sending them back to where they originated: “Monsieur Dufy’s Hamburg .” 
Apollinaire had written of the lion, "O lion, unhappy image, / Lamentably, of dear kings, / Now you are born only in a cage / In Hamburg, among the Germans" (Le Bestiare).