SOURCE: Martin, James. “Questions of Style.” Poetry 126, no. 2 (May 1975): 103-15.

In the following excerpt, Martin provides a favorable evaluation of The Shade-Seller, praising Jacobsen's natural and affirmative style.

In any century or era, there are ideas and images which become temporarily conventional, but beyond these, or possibly within them, there are more basic ideas, bound by neither time nor nationality, which should be written about. These basic ideas constitute our myths, our shared experience, and will always pre-occupy the human mind, without the popularity of fad and fashion. Through time, they have proved either too strange or too familiar for final conclusions. The Shade-Seller, by Josephine Jacobsen, and Collected Poems: 1930-1973, by May Sarton, explore and defend these pre-occupations.

The Shade-Seller is not only pleasurable to the ear, but almost tense with demands that the reader comprehend, relate. The poems have the inevitability of natural events like the...