Jarrell, Randall - R. W. Flint (essay date 1966)

R. W. Flint (essay date 1966)

SOURCE: Flint, R. W. “On Randall Jarrell.” Commentary 41, no. 2 (February 1966): 79-81.

[In the following essay, Flint calls Jarrell “the poet of the war” and briefly surveys his World War II pieces.]

Freedom, farewell! Or so the soldiers say;
And all the freedoms they spent yesterday
Lure from beyond the graves, a war away.
The cropped skulls resonate the wistful lies
Of dead civilians: truth, reason, justice;
The foolish ages haunt their unaccepting eyes.

From the green gloom of the untroubled seas
Their little bones (the coral of the histories)
Foam into marches, exultation, victories:
Who will believe the blood curled like a moan
From the soaked lips, a century from home—
The slow lives sank from being like a dream?

Randall Jarrell, who died last autumn in what seems clearly to have been a tragic accident, was in many ways the wonder and terror of American poetry during...

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