Ibsen the Poet

Abstract

IT MAY SEEM to you surprising that so much of the general discussion of Ibsen's work in the English language is preoccupied, directly or indirectly, with the distinction between poetry and prose. Your language reflects a unity of concept that English has long lost. We distinguish sharply between poet and prose writer, letting concern with form, in my opinion, destroy that much more significant unity enshrined in your word "dikter"-a word which, it seems to me, defines not by form but by creativeness of spirit. Thus we agonise over Ibsen the poet as against Ibsen the prose writer, try to locate the place, the reasons, the effects of a dislocation in his work where he ceased to be the one and became the other. I want, in this talk, to discuss Ibsen in your terms, as dikter, rather than in ours; as a man through the whole of whose work, poems, poetic dramas, prose dramas, runs a single unifying, creative intelligence. I shall not pretend that I have anything new to say to such an audience as this; but at a celebration, and this is an occasion of celebration, it may not come amiss to recall, with admiration and gratitude, the familiar attributes of the dikter we are gathered to honour.