injured poem

Once the poem is released, how little the poet owns it, or, indeed, matters to the poem. The poem has always been injured by the poet. Never, by man or woman, has it been fully released to its potential. Christopher Marlowe spoke for every poet when he wrote long ago in “Tamburlaine the Great” (and this is my favorite statement of what happens to a poem between its conception and its execution):

    If all the pens that ever poets held
    Had fed the feeling of their masters’ thoughts,
    And every sweetness that inspir’d their hearts,
    Their minds, and muses on admired themes;
    If all the heavenly quintessence they still
    From their immortal flowers of poesy,
    Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive
    The highest reaches of a human wit;
    If these had made one poem’s period,
    And all combin’d in beauty’s worthiness,
    Yet should there hover in their restless minds
    One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,
    Which into words no virtue can digest.

Always, the struggle is to help the poem release itself from things it cannot, in various stages, do without: publishers, editors, critics, funds, sponsors. Always the effort must be to shift the emphasis back to where it belongs, to the poem, which, though injured and subjected to the thousand ills print is heir to, must escape and survive.

—Josephine Jacobsen, “From Anne to Marianne: Some Women in American Poetry,” Two Lectures (The Library of Congress pamphlet, 1973)