Jean Garrigue


Jean Garrigue was an American poet.

Life

Garrigue was born Gertrude Louise Garrigus on December 8, 1912, in Evansville, Indiana. Growing up, she was a dreamy and intelligent young Midwestern girl drawn to art and the creative life. She lived in Indianapolis for much of her early life attended the University of Chicago, where she roomed with Marguerite Young, and did post-graduate study at the University of Iowa. When she first moved to New York City, she changed her name to Jean Garrigue. She eventually settled in New England where she wrote her first full-length publication, The Ego and the Centaur. She travelled in Europe in 1953-54, 1957–58, and 1962–63 and this influenced much of her later writing. Garrigue deliberately avoided domestic comfort and happiness—she never married or settled into a lasting relationship, and she never had children—in favor of continuous contact with raw and extreme emotional experience. Her life intertwines with several important literary figures. She was a lover of writers: R.P. Blackmur, Alfred Kazin, Delmore Schwartz, and Stanley Kunitz among others. The most important relationship in her life was her lengthy, but troubled liaison with novelist Josephine Herbst, who died in 1969.
In 1971, Garrigue was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease.

Work

Garrigue edited a weekly newspaper in the late thirties, was a researcher at Collier's, edited a U.S.O. publication during World War II, and was an assistant editor of an aeronautical magazine The Flying Cadet. She also reviewed fiction for the New Republic.
Garrigue's break as a poet came in 1941 when she was published in The Kenyon Review. She published her first collection in 1944, Thirty-six Poems and a Few Songs, in Five Young American Poets. Other collections include The Ego and the Centaur and The Monument Rose, A Walk by Villa d'Este and Country Without Maps —both based on her travel experiences—New and Selected Poems, and Studies for an Actress. She received awards from The Kenyon Review for two pieces of fiction, a 1944 short story and the 1966 novella The Animal Hotel. Her other prose publications include Essays and Prose Poems, and a study Marianne Moore.
Garrigue was an instructor of English literature at the University of Iowa, Bard College, Queens College, The New School for Social Research, the University of Connecticut, and Smith College. She also taught at the University of Washington, the University of California, Riverside, and Rhode Island College. She was a visiting poet at the University of Washington, Seattle, in 1970 and Poet-in-Residence at a number of colleges and universities, including the University of California, Riverside.
Garrigue held a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, which allowed her to travel to Paris in 1954. In 1961 she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and was nominated for a National Book Award for Country Without Maps.

Reception

Garrigue lived, moved, taught, and wrote as an equal among the best-remembered poets of her generation. Yet almost as soon as she died, her life and work disappeared from critical and academic view. How this happened has puzzled her friends and admirers; Alfred Kazin has called it one of the most significant literary mysteries of the twentieth century.
Part of the reason may be the intensity and unfashionability of her poems. Jarrell said that her work had "the guaranteeing and personal queerness of a diary," and many others have remarked on its uniqueness and strangeness. Her poems often describe a process of seeing and present a tide of images and ideas associated with the object seen. Lee Upton, the author of the only critical study of Garrigue's work, remarked on her "restless eye": "the eye is as the self pouring over surfaces and in effect 'reading' them," and many critics have observed the extravagance of her imagery. Her friend and sometime lover Stanley Kunitz described her as one "whose art took the road of excess that leads to the palace of wisdom. She was our one lyric poet who made ecstasy her home." Garrigue's poems have dazzled her fellow poets but have puzzled lay readers. Bonne August has said, "Garrigue is a 'difficult' poet, difficult in the formal demands she makes on the reader; difficult, too, in the demands she makes on her poetry: to take her past easy formulations, comfortable insights, or glib prescriptions, to the truth of thing." Jane Mayhall noted her drive to the "dangerously deep levels of self."
Garrigue did not belong to a poetic school or movement, and asserted intellectual, artistic, and emotional independence throughout her life. Theodore Roethke said that she trusted her own poetic instincts more than any poet he knew. Laurence Lieberman has said that "There are rewards to be secured in reading her best poems of a kind that can be found in no other body of work." Those rewards include lyricism and technical brilliance, richness in the service of clarity. Harvey Shapiro wrote that "Her way with language was Mozartean, breathtaking in its ability to ring change after change on a theme, Mozartean bursts of language, never leaving the subject, enabling the eye to see, clearly and more clearly, while delighting the ear with sound." Her poetic landscape is romantic, and her strategies are multiple. Garrigue was by nature a formal poet and used a wide range of traditional forms, borrowing from the metaphysicals and modernists alike. Her characteristic subjects are love and its discontents, the process of vision, morality and generosity, desire, feeling, and the imaginative power of women.
A minor resurgence of interest in Garrigue's work occurred in the decade between 1982 and 1992. In 1982, the journal Twentieth Century Literature devoted the better part of an issue to a symposium on her work, featuring commentary by both poets and scholars. In 1991, Lee Upton's monograph appeared. In 1992, a Selected Poems volume brought her work back into print for the first time since Studies for an Actress appeared in 1973, a year after her death. In between, a handful of essays on her work, primarily by poets, also appeared. Still, Garrigue continues to escape the notice of the traditional critical establishment, with its preference for a classical simplicity and clarity, and of the more recent feminist critics, to whom she makes no overt appeal.