Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface: Among the Nightmare Lovers of Hades
- 1 Eliot as Revolutionary
- 2 Goethe and Modernism: The Dream of Anachronism in Goethe's Roman Elegies
- 3 Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano
- 4 Does Time Exist?
- 5 The Age of Authenticity: An American Poet in England
- 6 Whitman and Wilde in Camden
- 7 Dangerous Thoughts, Puzzling Responses
- 8 Scaling the Wall
- 9 Mass Death and Resurrection: Notes on Contemporary, Mostly American, Jewish Fiction
- 10 Rilke, Einstein, Freud and the Orpheus Mystery
- 11 Shrouds Aplenty (on poems of Janowitz, et al)
- 12 Ambushes of Amazement (on poems of Wakoski)
- 13 Dangerous and Steep (on poems of Jacobsen)
- 14 Small Touching Skill (on poems of Ponsot)
- 15 Language Mesh (on Paul Celan)
- 16 Sweet Extra (on poems of Cuddihy, Ray)
- 17 Maze of the Original (on translating poetry)
- 18 Approaching the Medieval Lyric
- 19 Dark Passage (on poems of Stafford)
- 20 Mistress of Sorrows (on Ingeborg Bachmann)
- 21 The Innocence of a Mirror (on poems of Oliver)
- 22 Peskily Written (on Sade)
- 23 Is There Sex after Sappho?
- 24 Saving One's Skin (on medieval poetry)
- 25 Brilliant White Shadow (on poems and prose of Saba)
- 26 Serpent's Tale (on Minoan archeology)
- 27 How Honest Was Cellini?
- 28 The Poetry of No Compromises (on poems of Rehder)
- 29 Assigning Names (on poems of Nurkse)
- 30 History and Ethics: Bruni's History of Florence
- 31 Virgil's Aeneid Made New (a translation by Robert Fagles)
- 32 Painting with Poetry (on the poems of Annie Boutelle)
- 33 Vampires and Freedom (on the work of Erik Butler)
- 34 How the West Learned to Read and Write: Silent Reading and the Invention of the Sonnet
- List of Publications
- Index
13 - Dangerous and Steep (on poems of Jacobsen)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface: Among the Nightmare Lovers of Hades
- 1 Eliot as Revolutionary
- 2 Goethe and Modernism: The Dream of Anachronism in Goethe's Roman Elegies
- 3 Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano
- 4 Does Time Exist?
- 5 The Age of Authenticity: An American Poet in England
- 6 Whitman and Wilde in Camden
- 7 Dangerous Thoughts, Puzzling Responses
- 8 Scaling the Wall
- 9 Mass Death and Resurrection: Notes on Contemporary, Mostly American, Jewish Fiction
- 10 Rilke, Einstein, Freud and the Orpheus Mystery
- 11 Shrouds Aplenty (on poems of Janowitz, et al)
- 12 Ambushes of Amazement (on poems of Wakoski)
- 13 Dangerous and Steep (on poems of Jacobsen)
- 14 Small Touching Skill (on poems of Ponsot)
- 15 Language Mesh (on Paul Celan)
- 16 Sweet Extra (on poems of Cuddihy, Ray)
- 17 Maze of the Original (on translating poetry)
- 18 Approaching the Medieval Lyric
- 19 Dark Passage (on poems of Stafford)
- 20 Mistress of Sorrows (on Ingeborg Bachmann)
- 21 The Innocence of a Mirror (on poems of Oliver)
- 22 Peskily Written (on Sade)
- 23 Is There Sex after Sappho?
- 24 Saving One's Skin (on medieval poetry)
- 25 Brilliant White Shadow (on poems and prose of Saba)
- 26 Serpent's Tale (on Minoan archeology)
- 27 How Honest Was Cellini?
- 28 The Poetry of No Compromises (on poems of Rehder)
- 29 Assigning Names (on poems of Nurkse)
- 30 History and Ethics: Bruni's History of Florence
- 31 Virgil's Aeneid Made New (a translation by Robert Fagles)
- 32 Painting with Poetry (on the poems of Annie Boutelle)
- 33 Vampires and Freedom (on the work of Erik Butler)
- 34 How the West Learned to Read and Write: Silent Reading and the Invention of the Sonnet
- List of Publications
- Index
Summary
Josephine Jacobsen has published five volumes of poems since her first, Let Each Man Remember, in l940. This is her sixth, with selections of previous ones. It maintains her splendid high standards of seriousness, grace and wit, and above all provides the reader with a plateau from which to view the state of the art generally these days. If the excellences here are infrequently matched elsewhere, it may be essential to those of us passionate about poetry to note the differences, between accomplishment and failure, or simply between Jacobsen's fine work and a general failure of most others to think through the grand questions of poetry for this generation. One is instantly struck, for example, by Jacobsen's love of the English language, of its music, precision and wonderful expressiveness. This love is rare enough now. False theories of language are all the rage. The most pernicious of these— it goes by several fashionable names— is that when meanings are unclear, the fault must lie with the syntax and words, with language itself, rather than with the poet or writer, as if one were to berate the violin for the incompetence of the violinist. Other dismal trends also abound. So- called Language poetry, a fetish of the deliberately incoherent, is busy trying to massacre sense, logic and imagination at one fell swoop. The poetry of political propaganda again offers its fumbling self- righteous roars in bars and coffee houses. Nature poetry has staged a fearsome comeback. The pages of innumerable literary journals resound with sentimental anthems to cows and sheep, with arias celebrating the growth of lawns, with solemn hymns to insects and bushes. The cities are largely forgotten. Ordinary humanity is neglected. Hope, cleverness and insight are treated as musty antiques. A number of our better known poets have skittered into inaesthetic cynicism. Burdened with the great “weight” of these paradoxical times, they publish lyrics sweating with self- pity. This useless emotionalism is often accompanied by an abandonment of technique, a rejection of meaning, arbitrary images that lack development and squads of clichés.
There is not one cliché in this volume. Jacobsen presents no facile victories. Her techniques are usually solid. One knows why her lines end where they end, never sensing that the poet simply ran out of breath.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Poetry and FreedomDiscoveries in Aesthetics, 1985–2018, pp. 105 - 108Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2020