ive writer
and preferred to be called a "skjald" instead of a poet. The distinction
is significant but somewhat difficult to define. As Grundtvig himself
understood the term, the "skjald", besides being a poet, must also be a
seer, a man able to envision and express what was still hidden to the
common mortal. "The skjald is," he says, "the chosen lookout of life who
must reveal from his mountain what he sees at life's deep fountain. When
gripped by his vision," he says further, the skjald is "neither quiescent
nor lifeless but, on the contrary, lifted up into an exceptional state of
sensitiveness in which he sees and feels things with peculiar vividness
and power. I know of nothing in this material world to which the skjald
may more fittingly be likened than a tuned harp with the wind playing
upon it."

A skjald in Grundtvig's conception was thus a man endowed with the gift
of receiving direct impressions of life and things, of perceiving
especially the deeper and more fundamental truths of existence
intuitively instead of intellectually. Such perceptions, he admitted,
might lack the apparent clarity of reasoned conclusions, but would
approach nearer to the truth. For life must be understood from within,
must be spiritually discerned. It could never be comprehended by mere
intellect or catalogued by supposed science.

He knew, however, that his work was frequently criticized for its
ambiguity and lack of consistency. But he claimed that these defects were
unavoidable consequences of his way of writing. He had to write what he
saw and could not be expected to express that clearly which he himself
saw only dimly. "I naturally desire to please my readers," he wrote to
Ingemann, "but when I write as my intuition dictates, it works well;
ideas and images come to me without effort, and I fly lightly as the
gazelle from crag to crag, whereas if I warn myself that there must be a
limit to everything and that I must restrain myself and write sensibly, I
am stopped right there. And I have thus to choose between writing as the
spirit moves me, or not writing at all."

This statement, although it casts a revealing light both upon his genius
and its evident limitations, is no doubt extreme. However much Grundtvig
may have depended on his momentary inspiration for the poetical
development of his ideas, his fundamental views on life were
exceptionally clear and comprehensive. He knew what he believed regarding
the essential veritie