Preface

With the exception of a relatively small number of pieces, Ibsen's copious output as a poet has been little regarded, even in Norway. The English-reading public has been denied access to the whole corpus. That is regrettable, because in it can be traced interesting developments, in style, material and ideas related to the later prose works, and there are several poems, witty, moving, thought provoking, that are attractive in their own right.

The earliest poems, written in Grimstad, where Ibsen worked as an assistant to the local apothecary, are what one would expect of a novice. Resignation, Doubt and Hope, Moonlight Voyage on the Sea are, as their titles suggest, exercises in the conventional, introverted melancholy of the unrecognised young poet. Moonlight Mood, To the Star express a yearning for the typically ethereal, unattainable beloved. In The Giant Oak and To Hungary Ibsen exhorts Norway and Hungary to resist the actual and immediate threat of Prussian aggression, but does so in the entirely conventional imagery of the heroic Viking past.

From early on, however, signs begin to appear of a more personal and immediate engagement with real life. There is, for instance, a telling juxtaposition of two poems, each of them inspired by a female visitation. It is Over is undeviatingly an exercise in romantic glamour: the poet, wandering by moonlight mid the ruins of a great palace, is visited by the wraith of the noble lady once its occupant; whereupon the ruins are restored to their old splendour. The next poem, Room to Let, draws, as its title implies, on a wholly different source of inspiration: Ibsen's own desperate need, as a sex-starved youngster, to persuade a girl, any girl, to move into his untidy lodgings and help transform their squalor into a treasure house. Ibsen is beginning to tackle real life.

Another piece, Memories of a Ball, provides a more complex and explicit indication of Ibsen's impulse to reject convention for realism. Part poem, part prose, the piece is a long one because Ibsen needs not merely to express a subjective mood but to argue a case. It begins conventionally enough with a prologue, a tribute to the ethereal beloved, Stella, whom Ibsen borrows, as it were, from the famous poet Wergeland. But the poem quickly modulates, after a hint or two of parody, into a refutation of such posturing and a robust counter-assertion that the true facts of the sexual game are to be found closer to home, at a dance. “That may ring a little flat / and moreover unpoetic” Ibsen writes, but he proceeds to an amusing and acutely observed account of the goings-on at such an event. The prose ending, the last page of a disappointed lover's diary, may revert to the old-style suicidal gloom, but the gloom is so extreme and Ibsen's use of emotive dashes so excessive as to invite ridicule for an outworn romantic attitudinising.

Ibsen entered a new world when he moved to the capital, Christiania, as a would-be student in the Medical Faculty. The University, a recent foundation, was an exciting assertion of Norway's cultural independence from Denmark. Although he failed, in Greek, to gain admission, he was accorded the status of “student” and was thus able to play some part in undergraduate life. The change is reflected in the general tone of the poems written during this period. The frustrated gloom manifests itself still in, for instance, The Miner and Bird and Bird-Catcher, but even there Ibsen begins to draw inspiration from a real-life occupation and from his own boyhood recollections. In The Lad in the Bilberry Patch he punctures the facile sentimentality of a city poet by revealing the real facts, of poverty and sickness, that motivate the lad's industry; The Tear stems from vivid memories of his own boyhood grief when he could not join his toboganning friends because his boots had come apart. A Saturday Evening in Hardanger offers the routinely folk-loreish account of the source of poetic in spiration but the poet is the local travelling tailor and the setting an amusingly observed dance in a farmyard, with young couples slipping off into the woods under the sardonic gaze of their elders.

There are reversions to self-pity — in The Eider Duck for instance — and to the old nostalgia for the heroic past in To Denmark; but On Ladergaardsøen ends on the hopeful note of a spiritual regeneration as does the long Prologue written for the new, specifically Norwegian Theatre that had been founded in Bergen. There is a major reversion, also, to the stock heroic mode in Ibsen's first attempt at epic form, Helge Hundingsbane. It is a well-told tale of derring-do, but it displays Ibsen's unreflecting acceptance at this time of its essentially brutal values — Helge is a hero because he slays many men including the father and brothers of his beloved, Sigrun. She, undaunted, remains true to him and joins him in death as his shield-maid in Valhalla. Ibsen was to write other epics and quasi-epics but they were to define heroism in a more adult and perceptive way. It is perhaps significant that the poem following Helge Hundingsbane, the last written during this period, is A Leg-Pull, a satirical barb aimed at stock poetical sentimentality.

Ibsen's move to Bergen as resident dramatist at the Norwegian Theatre there involved him in an exciting and challenging undertaking, but it threatened to impose new restrictions on his budding freedom from conventions. Almost as soon as he arrived he was cast in the role of occasional poet — for weddings, club meetings, official visits and other celebrations. The occasions themselves demanded a certain appropriateness of tone and sentiment; Ibsen often played safe by choosing, and sometimes somewhat laboriously developing, an all-too-obvious imagery: a sea-captain's married life will be a sea-voyage, a theatrical couple will play their parts in life and the theatre until the final curtain. But more limiting were the constraints imposed on meter and stanzaic form by the fact that such occasional poems were meant to be sung to a well-known melody. Ibsen's individuality as a poet is, in consequence, largely obliterated.

There are, however, other indications. The Prologue to a matinee performance at the Norwegian Theatre is an engagingly direct assessment of its modest achievements to date and it convinces one of Ibsen's sense of commitment to the enterprise. Occasional poems such as Greetings to the Viceroy and Song at the Celebration of our Forebear's Memory may draw on traditional heroics but in them Ibsen begins to translate heroism into terms of moral courage or largeness of vision in the face of the actual dangers and perplexities of contemporary life. Even amongst the seemingly routine love poems — To my Primrose, To R.H, With a Rose, — there are others, To Susannah Thorensen, To the One and Only, Wild Flowers and Potted Plants, that convince one that Ibsen is writing not to an incorporeal idea but to a real girl valued for her inner resources of character; and A Bird Song is a vivid, humorously unpompous record of an embarrassing moment in Ibsen's real life courtship of Rikke Holst.

One further development deserves attention. In the Picture Gallery demonstrates Ibsen's desire to engage seriously with the complexities of being a poet in real life, a desire that generates a need for an expansiveness in a form far removed from the jejune narrative of Helge Hundingsbane. The piece is not in epic form but of epic length — a sequence of thirty-three sonnets; it is both a lively account of Ibsen's visit to one of Dresden's galleries during his tour abroad and an extended exploration into the painful frustrations of the creative artist.

Most of the poems that Ibsen wrote after his return to Christiania to work in the Norwegian Theatre there were occasional — but occasional with a difference. In piece after piece his purpose is no longer, as so often in his early poems, to urge a king or a nation to take up the sword against oppression. Instead he exhorts a nation to establish its independence through the integrity of its language and culture, not just of its frontiers. His new heroes are King Oskar, a patron of the arts and literature in Norway, Ole Vig, a leader of educational reform, Professor Schweigaard and J. L. Heiberg, prominent intellectuals of the day, and Chr. Jørgensen, a famous actor. It is through such men that nations can achieve their true and proper stature. The full weight of Ibsen's contempt for those that betray the obligations of such leadership can be felt in the two lengthy, scathing letters to H. Ø. Blom.

Two works of this period deserve particular attention. They are both very long. One, On the Heights, is a kind of spiritual epic, tracing the dilemma of the poet torn between his longing for the normal satisfactions of life and the exigent demands of art. The other, Terje Vigen, is a true epic, one that attains, more fully than any of the previous poems, the objectives towards which Ibsen has been working. Terje begins as a humdrum figure out of real life, a fisherman, but Ibsen goes on to develop a sense of his heroic stature; not merely in terms of the suffering he endures during the English blockade of Norway, but of the spiritual strength he manifests when he brings himself to forgive the man responsible for the ruin of his life. The poem pierces to the core of Terje's integrity as a great human being; the condensed, allusive imagery of the last few lines is perhaps the most poignant that Ibsen ever employed: the humble, neglected grave, the rough grass growing around it, and the wild flowers that show through.

There is no mistaking the liberating effects of Ibsen's departure for foreign parts. In From my Home Life and The Gulley his concern is still, narrowly, his own private problems as a poet, but he ranges more widely in subject-matter and forms. The targets for his contempt take on a cosmopolitan dimension. Abraham Lincoln's Murder is a trenchant condemnation of the moral hypocrisy of Europe at large; To the Revolutionary Orator dismisses the ineffectual posturing of a purely theoretical revolutionary fervour. The perspectives are broader, though the forms are familiar.

The Epic Brand suggests a new development. The setting appears to be narrowly Norwegian, yet in this very long fragment Ibsen is clearly trying to personify the conflict that he has explored in more general terms, namely the conflict between integrity and a corrupt social environment. It was a theme dear to Ibsen's heart, yet, after a year's laborious effort and more than a hundred stanzas, he suddenly abandoned the project.

Several reasons have been adduced, but it seems likely that Ibsen had come to feel constrained by his narrative form. The fragment is impressive, but most readers would testify to its slow space, to the retarding effect of the stanzaic structu re. Characters, settings, actions — everything has to be described. Yet at the very end Ibsen seems to hit upon a dramatic alternative. It presents itself in the scene showing an asinine bailiff distributing relief to the starving peasants. At last the Epic Brand shows that a slow-moving narrative might be turned into a lively dramatic encounter. For whatever reason, Ibsen abandoned the repetitive form for the flexible rhyming, the swift pace, the immediacy and variety of his great dramatic poem Brand which can be thought of as his first modern tragedy.

It is indisputable that the finest of Ibsen's later poems benefit both from the enlargement of his experiences abroad, and from a new flexibility of form, though the preoccupations remain the same. Balloon Letter to a Swedish Lady, written in a lively, ode-like form, is not only an amusing travelogue of Ibsen's trip to Egypt but it concludes with a damning comparison between the lifeless, sacerdotal culture of that country and the deadening authoritarianism of contemporary Prussia. His aim is to define the difference between a distorted and a genuine concept of national identity. In Rhyme Letter to Fru Heiberg the vantage point of distance allows Ibsen not only to survey the whole span of the great actress's career but to celebrate the inspirational effect her art has had on her whole nation. The ode form, with its fluidity and suppleness, conveys beautifully the varied excellence of her performances.

Ibsen continued to write poems, some of them deeply personal, but the poetic impulse clearly wanes, no doubt because he had discovered his true metier as a writer of prose plays. But these works can be seen not so much as a complete break with his poetical output but as the culmination of the various tendencies exemplified throughout the corpus: his determination to create art out of real life, to pursue at greater depth and in more intimately personal terms his exploration of the tragic conflict between individual integrity and social laxity. Furthermore he carries over into his prose dialogue the lessons he had come to learn from his later work as a poet. The passionate vehemence of Solness, the complacency of Manders, the burning frustrations of Hedda are conveyed not merely by what they say but through the subtle movement and rhythm of the prose they speak. It could be argued that Ibsen never ceased to be a poet.



Note: In the Norwegian Centenary Edition of the poems, those that appeared in the selection made in 1871 are printed as a separate entity. In this version of the corpus they have been intercalated in substantially chronological order. As to form, I have risked the hazards of reproducing as nearly as possible the verse structures, rhyme schemes and meters of the original.