Jarrell, Randall - Donald Hall (review date 1960)

Donald Hall (review date 1960)

SOURCE: Hall, Donald. Review of The Woman at the Washington Zoo, by Randall Jarrell. New Republic 143, no. 27 (26 December 1960): 18-19.

[In the following review of The Woman at the Washington Zoo, Hall faults Jarrell for poetic sentimentality, even when it is combined with brutality.]

Randall Jarrell is not incompetent. He doesn't use outrageously inappropriate diction, or mix his metaphors madly, or make noises which grate on the ear like chalk on a blackboard. It is true that his diction is never particularly interesting, nor his metaphors inventive. He is scornful of meter (he writes poems in iambic pentameter and inserts random Alexandrines), and he uses clichés (“an uncontrollable / Shudder runs through her flesh”). But I don't think that one can condemn him on this evidence alone. The poet must control the feeling in the poem; Jarrell lacks control, not over the precision of form,...

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