Taibl has published widely in the field of twentieth-century poetry. In the following essay, she explores Schnackenberg's poem and how it presents the relationship of historic and literary eras.

"Darwin in 1881" is a poem about the relationship of the present to the past. In the work, Gjertrud Schnackenberg explores the complexity of historical and artistic relationships as new ideas and standards replace old ones. In the poem, the reader meets the geologist Darwin a year before his death—after his theories are published, after his career has come and gone, and at a turning point in the middle-aged man's life. Schnackenberg draws parallels betweenDarwin's life and the life of the artist-king, Prospero, from Shakespeare's play The Tempest. As she strings together historic and literary times and the people that draw histories together, she explores the debt of modern poetry to the forms and traditions of a literary...