Untam’d Wing

Jef­frey C. Robinson

The jazz term “riff” is short for “riffle”—“make rough.” In Untam’d Wing: Riffs on Roman­tic Poetry, scholar/poet Jef­frey Robin­son sets out much like a jazz musi­cian to renew a great body of work (say, Miles Davis on George Gershwin)—“to recast,” as he says in the Prefa­tory Note, “what have become mon­u­ments, with all the inert­ness of pas­sive appre­ci­a­tion that mon­u­men­tal­ity encour­ages, into liv­ing forms.” If he “roughs up” some of our long-time favorites, it’s not to revise, and cer­tainly not to improve, but on the con­trary to reveal a time­less dimen­sion that is of the very nature of the Roman­tic: “I would define a ‘roman­tic’ poem, of what­ever vin­tage, as one that invites its own renewal in every present.” With all the bold­ness and sub­tle care of the poets he cel­e­brates, Robin­son stakes his “life-long involve­ment as reader, teacher, and scholar/critic of Roman­tic poetry” on an equally com­mit­ted “absorp­tion and belief in the dis­cov­er­ies of mod­ern and con­tem­po­rary exper­i­men­tal poetry.” Like a true mar­riage it lays bare both parties.

“Untam’d Wing is a heady con­glom­er­a­tion of poetic inten­si­ties and re-visionings, of the Roman­tic mother lode. Only a poet deeply embed­ded in and enthralled by this realm could take wild lib­er­ties and shape them into a con­tem­po­rary vol­ume of such curi­ous and inven­tive range. Jef­frey Robin­son is a scholar and has lived inside the Roman­tic body for decades, and pre­cisely because of this his imag­i­na­tion is highly attuned to fur­ther Roman­tic nuance…. He sheds bright light on mean­ing and mes­sage. He is the scientist/artist finally break­ing free of shack­les.“
—Anne Wald­man, from the foreword