SOURCE: Quinn, Justin. “Jorie Graham and the Politics of Transcendence.” PN Review 24, no. 6 (July 1998): 22-5.

In the following essay, Quinn views Graham's poetic works as following a tradition that seeks to capture moments of Emersonian transcendence, while at the same time attempting to remain involved with the political.

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Jorie Graham belongs to a poetic tradition which attempts to encompass the most ecstatic moments of spiritual transcendence without absconding from political and social contexts. Her staunchest advocate, Helen Vendler, has placed her firmly in the meditative lyric tradition that is concerned above all with matters of spirit and human perception. But as is clear from a recent article on her in The New Yorker, the political has always mattered to Graham in an immediate way. In the 1970s, through her marriage into the newspaper dynasty of the Grahams (owners of Newsweek and the Washington Post, which broke the Watergate...