Jarrell, Randall - George Greene (essay date 1960)

George Greene (essay date 1960)

SOURCE: Greene, George. “Four Campus Poets.” Thought 35, no. 137 (summer 1960): 223-46.

[In the following excerpt, Greene largely focuses on the war-inspired pieces of Jarrell's Collected Poems, noting their successful representation of the depersonalizing anonymity of war, while acknowledging failures of dramatic obscurity and empty abstraction in some of the works.]

… Examining our own age, one feels that Mr. Randall Jarrell has most profitably integrated experiences derived from its widest clash of forces, World War II. In his Collected Poems one third of the material is associated directly with war, a category where he has made notable contributions to our aesthetic life. We accept with unquestioning faith military camps and airfields so accurately fixed: “sand roads, tar-paper barracks, / The bubbling asphalt of the runways, sage, / The dunes rising to the interminable ranges, /...

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