SOURCE: Reeve, F. D. “Of Shoemakers and Snails.” Poetry 170, no. 1 (April 1997): 37-51.

In the following excerpt, Reeve illustrates the ways in which Jacobsen's poetry has adapted to different social climates throughout her career.

Sixty years is a long life in poetry. Not many manage thirty—Berryman, Jarrell. Others, no matter how long they're on earth, have even fewer—Thomas, Blackmur, Dugan. Josephine Jacobsen's [In the Crevice of Time: New and Collected Poems] gathers her work into more than 250 pages in five sheaves of 15, 15, 5, 5, and 20 years from the mid-Thirties to the mid-Nineties. In those first, desperate years,

If you speak You cannot be delicate or sad or clever. Some other hour, in a moist April, We will consider similes for the budding larches. 

Forty years later, in a changed political climate, once-urgent poetry become superfluous, the socially engaged poet who imagined broad solidarity and economic betterment, is merely a...