Jack Gilbert

The Courage to Stubbornly Accept Our Gladness

The line comes from "A Brief for the Defense" in Refusing Heaven (2005), a poem that surveys famine, war, and everyday grief while insisting that delight still belongs to us. Gilbert, who wrote elegies like "Michiko Dead" after the loss of his partner Michiko Nogami, knew sorrow intimately. Yet he contends that the world’s "ruthless furnace" does not nullify gladness; it intensifies its urgency. Thus, the poem’s insistence on delight is not denial but a hard-earned verdict rendered in full view of suffering. [...]

Choosing Joy: A Stubborn, Necessary Risk

At the outset, Jack Gilbert’s imperative to ‘risk delight’ sets a moral frame. In his poem A Brief for the Defense, collected in Refusing Heaven (2005), he argues for gladness ‘in the ruthless furnace of this world.’ Rather than frivolity, this is courage: to let oneself be moved by beauty despite grief’s certainty. Because cynicism often masquerades as wisdom, choosing gladness requires stubbornness; it means staking dignity on the belief that tenderness belongs alongside ruin. Thus, the risk is not naiveté but commitment—to the world as it truly is, which contains both devastation and radiance. [...]