Josephine Jacobsen, a critically praised lyric poet and short-story writer who had been poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, died late Wednesday of kidney failure at Broadmead Retirement Community in Cockeysville.
The former North Baltimore resident was 94.
She wrote for more than eight decades, and her poems regularly appeared in The New Yorker, among other publications.
But major recognition came to Mrs. Jacobsen relatively late in life. It was not until 1971, when she was 63, that she became consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, a position now called U.S. poet laureate. At age 88, she became a National Book Award finalist for In the Crevice of Time.
Critics mentioned that her poetry dealt with the problems and anxieties of humankind, but beneath that was a profound sense of optimism, based on her deeply held Roman Catholic beliefs, which included, as she once said, "belief in another chapter."
Mrs. Jacobsen described herself as a "short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist." She thought the imagination was "the active, secret subterranean life."
Weighing 2 pounds, Josephine Winder Boylan was born while her parents were vacationing in Ontario. She was 10 and living in New York when she first saw one of her poems appear in print, in the children's St. Nicholas Magazine. Years later, in a 1997 interview with The Sun, she recalled buying a copy at a news kiosk:
"I stood on the sidewalk, obstructive, stunned, looking at my words, naked, displayed to the world, and happily I did not know that this deflowering would be a climax never reached again. For I was purely satisfied."
Her father died when she was a child. She and her mother lived in various places and then moved to Baltimore about 80 years ago. She did not attend elementary school and instead was taught by tutors. She earned a diploma in 1926 from Roland Park Country School after two years of study.
She did not attend college but was awarded honorary degrees from a half-dozen institutions, including the Johns Hopkins University, the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, Towson University and St. Mary's Seminary and University.
She and her mother became Roman Catholics when they were inspired by the sight of religious pilgrims in France who were climbing stone steps on their knees.
