[In the following review of The Woman at the Washington Zoo, Hall faults Jarrell for poetic sentimentality, even when it is combined with brutality.]

Randall Jarrell is not incompetent. He doesn't use outrageously inappropriate diction, or mix his metaphors madly, or make noises which grate on the ear like chalk on a blackboard. It is true that his diction is never particularly interesting, nor his metaphors inventive. He is scornful of meter (he writes poems in iambic pentameter and inserts random Alexandrines), and he uses clichés (“an uncontrollable / Shudder runs through her flesh”). But I don't think that one can condemn him on this evidence alone. The poet must control the feeling in the poem; Jarrell lacks control, not over the precision of form, but over his feelings. One senses that when he uses clichés he knows it, but that he uses them anyway, with a kind of defiance. One senses a poet who might prefer Life to Art as if he were making a useful distinction. Usually the writer with a contempt for art simply proclaims his own incompetence; he adopts a sentimental argument in order to proclaim as choice what is really necessity. With Jarrell, I feel that the contempt exists as a principle, not as an excuse. And I feel that his clichés are a function of his radical sentimentality.

He uses emotions whose sources he does not acknowledge. Sometimes his language makes this particularly obvious. In the title poem of this book, which contains many laments over the loss of youth and so on, the woman is looking at the animals. Jarrell has her say: “And there come not to me, as come to these, / The wild beasts …”

The self-pity of the first line, with its arch inversion, is not ironical. Jarrell is for the woman, not against her. And yet he shows her attitudinizing, as if she were rehearsing before a mirror.

But perhaps it would be fairer to take a more celebrated example. “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” one of the war poems which granted Jarrell his reputation, has been anthologized in fifty states, and read in at least 2,000 colleges. Here it is:

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

The academic explication of this poem praises it because it uses “birth imagery”; the turret is a womb from which the gunner is born into death. Be that as it may, it is when one reads the last line that one sees the real failure of the poem, the dispersal of its possible point. The detail of the hose is pure sentimentality. The man is dead, and he is no deader for being in fragments which have stuck to the metal and plexiglas. The manner of death has nothing to do with the rest of the poem, yet it occupies the portentous ending of a tiny poem. The line is like the oracular remarks of Sergeant Friday on Dragnet, and it chokes with the softness of toughness. Jarrell's note in the Selected Poems reads, “The hose was a steam hose.”

Wherever you read in Jarrell, you find morbidity. My favorite note reads, in its entirety: “‘La Belle au Bois Dormant’ is a poem about a murdered woman; her body has been put in a trunk, and the trunk checked in a railway station.” The combination of sentimentality and cruelty has been noted before, especially in the Germany which provides Jarrell with much of his subject matter. The poet of violent death is never without complicity.

In The Woman at the Washington Zoo, Jarrell writes at his best in “Jamestown” and “The Traveler.” The poem called “In Those Days” begins with a nice description of courtship; the boy leaves the girl at her house, and goes home to sleep alone. Then comes the last stanza:

How poor and miserable we were,
How seldom together!
And yet after so long one thinks:
In those days everything was better.

It isn't the writing which is bad here. The language could seem admirably plain if the poem were correctly felt. But Jarrell leaves us with this trivial announcement of feeling. The rush of self-pity in the last line—like blood to the head—blinds him to the questions it raises. We have all heard this sentiment expressed: on television, in The Reader's Digest, in melodramas where the rich man comes to doubt the value of his money. Perhaps it is even true that people often feel this way. But why do they? Is it age and sexual deterioration? Is it the result of social compromise? What is the origin of the dissatisfaction?

Some poems in the last section of this book represent nightmares and hallucinations. Jarrell has written in this convention before, and has achieved a certain power by means of it. Of course a nightmare is violent, and even cruel. But perhaps there are other reasons why Jarrell finds the convention attractive. If you cannot deal with the commonplace except to sentimentalize it, you may wish to avoid it by dealing with its irrational reverse. The extraordinary provides a cover-up for the ordinary. Again, violence is the concomitant of unexamined emotion. In nightmares begin irresponsibilities.