Jensen was a Danish writer active from the late 19th to the early 20th century, best known for the six-volume series "The Long Journey." Influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, he reconstructed human history as a grand narrative. By blending scientific viewpoints with lyricism, he brought a fresh spirit to the literary scene of his time. His innovative metaphors and rhythmic prose later inspired modernist literature. The Nobel citation’s “intellectual curiosity” refers to his readiness to weave geography, biology, and ethnology into his texts. His works are entertaining yet prompt readers to consider how humans adapt and develop within their environment. This perspective can also inform contemporary discussions of globalization and ecological issues. In the short-story collection "Himmerland Tales," he portrays rural life with realism, adding a social dimension. Jensen employed concise Danish that is friendly to translation, gaining an international readership. This holistic literary activity culminated in his 1944 Nobel Prize in Literature.

"The Long Journey" (1908-22) is an ambitious historical romance that spans from the Paleolithic Age to Columbus’ 15th-century voyages, virtually diagramming human evolution in novel form. Jensen interlaces Darwinism, geology, ethnography, and Norse myth to portray human history as a chain of “movement” and “adaptation.” His style—short sentences rich in alliteration and word repetition—creates a cascade of poetic images, contrasting with the long-winded naturalist prose of his era. This method influenced the emerging German Expressionists and Anglo-American modernists, who borrowed his compression of time and space. The rapid shift of narrative viewpoints resembles montage editing, resonating with the evolution of 20th-century film art. "Himmerland Tales" (1898) vividly renders the Jutland dialect and thus bridges oral folklore and modern literature, holding high ethnographic value. The “freshly creative style” cited by the Nobel Committee implies cross-genre writing that slides between prose poetry and scientific essay. In literary studies, Jensen is often examined through the tri-axial model “MMR = Myth, Migration, Reality.” His texts underpin re-evaluation of nature in Nordic literature and have been fertile ground for post-colonial critique. The 1944 award, granted while Europe was at war, also underscored the capacity of cultural expression to transcend political circumstances.

Jensen’s prose intersects Darwinian evolutionary discourse with Symbolist poetics, deconstructing the 19th-century positivist conception of language. In "Den lange rejse" he abandons annalistic structure, employing fragmented temporal jumps and multi-focal narration, prefiguring Proustian and Mannian experiments with narrative time. Lexical refrains and paratactic arrangements within the text act as polyphonic nodes in Saidian textual spatiality, generating layered subjectivities. His exploitation of Danish sibilant patterns for phonetic symbolism is frequently cited as a case study in Jakobsonian sound symbolism research. The 1944 award is analyzed in cultural-political history as a rare instance of the Academy valuing peripheral Nordic literary experimentation during World War II. The cited "fertility of poetic imagination" has been interpreted as decisive evidence of the permeability between Nordic natural science and literature since the fin-de-siècle. Recent ecocriticism models the "dynamic metaphor generation" algorithm in Jensen’s depictions of flora and fauna evolution, attempting quantitative verification within environmental literary studies. Comparative literature has revisited the concept of “northern orientation” through polar-text analyses alongside Stefansson and London. The digital humanities project "JensenNet" visualizes his lexical fields via n-gram analysis, dynamically mapping stylistic shifts across the modernist transition. These studies reposition Jensen from a local Nordic figure to a hub of experimental world literature.