Criticism > Poetry > Jarrell, Randall - Thomas Travisano (essay date 1996)

Jarrell, Randall - Thomas Travisano (essay date 1996)

Thomas Travisano (essay date 1996)

SOURCE: Travisano, Thomas. “Randall's Jarrell's Poetics: A Rediscovered Milestone.” Georgia Review 50, no. 4 (winter 1996): 691-96.

[In the following essay, Travisano remarks on Jarrell's 1942 lecture “Levels and Opposites: Structure in Poetry” (first published in 1996), and discusses his status as a literary critic.]

No ideas but in things.

—William Carlos Williams

There are no things in a poem, only processes.

—Randall Jarrell

For many readers today the name of Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) is associated most firmly with such haunting war poems as “Losses,” “Siegfried,” “Protocols,” and the oft-anthologized “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”—all of which appeared in his second published collection, Little Friend, Little Friend (1945). Indeed, when his close association with Robert Lowell...

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