A friend gave me this book several years ago, and one of the curses of having a really large "to be read" stack (mine is actually a small bookshelf" is that some books can be overlooked for years. But then again, I trust that the books I pick to read, that I gravitate to on that shelf, are the ones for which I'm most in the mood, or most ready to read, and that was definitely the case with this book. In a way, it reminds me of the forgotten American classic, Stoner by John Williams, in the way it chronicles a life, that in many ways unremarkable, but is thus remarkable through that very thing - that every human's life is rich with experience, longing, pain, joy - that we are all at the center of our own dramas. This is also a book about the power of poetry, and how to live when you decide that there is no God, but had been raised believing in God - how to make meaning of your life. In this, this is a forerunner to Camus and Sartre, and the blurbs on the back are no less from Rilke, Freud, Ibsen, Thomas Mann, and Herman Hesse.

It is also a beautiful meditation on poetry and art. In a passage about an artist, he wrote of the artist that "He was one of those in whom a dream is buried which spreads holiness and peace around a little place in their souls, where they are most themselves and least themselves . . . no matter where [they] dove down into the sea of beauty, [they] always brought up the same pearl into the light. (120)

And this on poetry and the acquiring of knowledge in order to write poetry:
"that's the way your being grows with your knowledge, it is clarified by it, unified by it. It is as wonderful to learn as it is to live. Don't be afraid yourself of losing yourself in larger spirits than your own. (110)

Originally published in 1880 in Denmark, this book is too little known in the United States, and should stand alongside our reading of Jane Austen, George Eliot, and all others in the classic cannon.