Poetry Criticism | Swenson, May - Barbara Gibbs (essay date 1959)

Barbara Gibbs (essay date 1959)

SOURCE: In a review of A Cage of Spines, in Poetry, Vol. 94, No. 3, June, 1959, pp. 190-94.

[Gibbs was an American poet. In this excerpt, she attempts to define the poetry of A Cage of Spines. Gibbs concludes her observations with a wish that Swenson would attempt more ambitious poetry.]

[How], on the basis of the poems in A Cage of Spines, would I, as a particular critic—not speaking at all for Miss Swenson, but putting myself as nearly as possible in the poems' posture—describe the view of poetry herein represented? Several questions that I might ask myself occur to me: (1) Does the poem have a subject, other than itself? (2) If it has such a recognizable subject, then in what relation to same does the poem stand (setting to jewel, pattern to thread, identity, jeu d'esprit to occasion, or some other that I cannot now think of)? (3) Or, another way of inquiring about what...

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