Criticism > Poetry > Jarrell, Randall - Stephen Spender (review date 1948)

Jarrell, Randall - Stephen Spender (review date 1948)

Stephen Spender (review date 1948)

SOURCE: Spender, Stephen. Review of Losses, by Randall Jarrell. Nation 166, no. 18 (1 May 1948): 475-76.

[In the following review of Losses, Spender compares Jarrell's poetry to that of the Victorians Lord Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, while also emphasizing the distinctly American and modern quality of Jarrell's work.]

All poets inevitably inhabit mental landscapes, if one may enlarge the word “landscape” to include sea, sky, towns, and the waste land. Today it is strikingly apparent that American poets inhabit a landscape entirely different in time and place from that of European poets. The Europeans inhabit a landscape of disintegration; and their reactions are mainly either to accept and express disintegration or to transcend it by creating an interior, spiritual landscape of the mind. For Americans, on the other hand, their landscape is still the overwhelming actuality of...

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