“We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.”
― Jack Gilbert
For me, Jack Gilbert was one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. He was born in Pittsburgh in 1925, a city built on grit and hard work. He came from a working-class family with the massive steel mills, factories, and coal mines as the backdrop of his boyhood. A nagging desire for something more soon overtook him. An escape.
After a stay at the University of Pittsburgh, he strayed over to Europe in the 1950s, living in Paris and Italy, soaking up the beat of old cities and the weight of their histories.
There, in love affairs and loneliness, his poetry first took hold, a poetry that was lean, clear, and vitriolically alive.
His first book, Views of Jeopardy (1962), won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, establishing him as a literary force. The critics complimented his primal tone, and, despite growing interest in his work, Gilbert shunned fame, substituting it with an ascetic commitment to his work.
For years, he lived on the Santorini-esque islands of Greece, with poet Linda Gregg, his long-time lover, whose specter haunts his work. His poetry at this period struggles with loss and happiness, love and impermanence. They were honest poems, beautifully written with a melancholic clarity few are capable of.
"Walking home across the plain in the dark. And Linda crying. Again we have come to a place where I rail and she suffers and the moon does not rise. We have only each other, but I am shouting inside the rain and she is crying like a wounded animal, knowing there is no place to turn. It is hard to understand how we could be brought here by love."
Gilbert wrote sparingly—only five books altogether in his lifetime, including The Great Fires (1994) and Refusing Heaven (2005), which was the recipient of a National Book Critics Circle Award. He also taught at colleges and universities but avoided fame, living simply in places like Northampton, Massachusetts, and Berkeley, California.
His later years were low-key, plagued by sickness, but his writing became more piercing, confronting death with a wholeness of heart. He died in 2012, leaving behind a brilliant, yet sparse, body of work that throws light on the messiness and marvel of being alive in the human flesh.
Below, I’ve compiled three little remarkable poems by Gilbert that reflect his poetic brilliance. I hope you enjoy them.