SOURCE: “The Poetry of David Ignatow,” in Boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature, Vol. IV, No. 1, Fall, 1975, pp. 289-97.

In the following essay, Mazzaro examines the philosophical underpinnings of Ignatow's poetry.

Goethe's view of style as resting “on the deepest fundamental ground of knowledge, on the essence of things,”¹ and the discovery of this essence in a connaturality of reality and subjectivity lie behind Robert Bly's choices for The Selected Poems of David Ignatow. The decisions have been, in Bly's case, further transmogrified by the writings of Carl Jung, who makes no effort to hide the influence of Goethe and German Romanticism on his thinking. Thus, one of America's classic city poets is cast into a role similar to that which Martin Heidegger defines for Friedrich Hölderlin—the poet as mediator of logos (word) and physis (thing). Facing the Tree, Ignatow's newest collection of poems, strengthens this...