Holger Drachmann was the son of a naval doctor. He studied art in Copenhagen and became a painter after his studies, after having met the painter Carl Bloch, who had returned from abroad, at the age of 19. But he soon gave up art in favor of journalism. Traveling through Europe and a longer stay in England as a journalist made him aware of the social ills of the time.
Back in Copenhagen, Drachmann joined the circle of modern breakthrough poets around Georg Brandes. He was a welcome guest there, with his enthusiastic homage to the Paris Commune and ironic attacks on the intellectual narrowness of Denmark.
In his later love and nature poetry, the sea was predominantly sung as a symbol of restlessness, freedom and strength; in his mostly realistic stories he described the life of the fishermen in their homeland. The problems of the Danish bourgeoisie are reflected very precisely in Drachmann's work: the vacillation between bourgeois and liberal. It was the same with the poet; erratic in life and in attitude, he changes from democratic to nationalistic. Criticism of the decline of bourgeois society, whose downfall he prophesied, appears again and again in the works.
In 1902 Holger Drachmann settled in Skagen and resumed painting. He died at the age of 61 in Hornbæk on Zealand. The urn with his ashes was buried in Skagen at the Grenen headland. His home was turned into a public museum, Drachmanns Hus, in 1911. The Drachmann Legatet grant, which has been awarded since 1917, is named after Drachmann.