Criticism > Poetry > Jarrell, Randall - Malcolm Cowley (review date 1942)

Jarrell, Randall - Malcolm Cowley (review date 1942)

Malcolm Cowley (review date 1942)

SOURCE: Cowley, Malcolm. Review of Blood for a Stranger, by Randall Jarrell. New Republic 107, no. 22 (30 November 1942): 718-19.

[In the following review of Blood for a Stranger, Cowley enumerates Jarrell's debts to various poets from W. B. Yeats to Hart Crane, while admiring the strengths of his verse.]

In reviewing the new books of verse, Randall Jarrell has tortured so many poets and made such entertaining jokes while they squirmed on the rack that one admires his superb foolhardiness in publishing a book of his own.1 It is as if Jeffreys, the hanging judge, had voluntarily put himself on trial. Will his maimed victims now cluster round him to cry “Blood! Blood from this stranger”? And the scores he has condemned to oblivion, sometimes merely because he didn't like the color of their metaphors—will this be the moment when they reach out for him with their wraithlike arms...

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