THE COLLECTED POEMS OF HENRIK IBSEN Translated by John ...

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would testify to its slow space, to the retarding effect of the stanzaic structure.
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.
John Northam
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.