[In the following review of The Complete Poems, Carruth appraises Jarrell's poetic sensibility and works, observing that his war poems are his finest and that in them Jarrell successfully leaps from “romantic agony to genuine tragic vision.”]

Randall Jarrell was a romanticist of the generation which came to adulthood during the miserable 1930s in a society whose most active intellectual centers were dominated by the thought and style of T. S. Eliot and, behind him, of Irving Babbitt. Jarrell reacted as did the others. He launched into a search for a way out of the social and cultural order which seemed to him, and which was, superannuated. More than this, he launched—in spite of his Southern politesse, for he was born in Nashville and graduated from Vanderbilt—with an eagerness that was virtually demoniacal. Among his romantic contemporaries, he was an especially pure example of the type—at least so I have always thought. He was what Jacques Barzun has called an intrinsic romanticist; that is, a figure existing outside the primary epoch of European romanticism but still exhibiting the romanticist's primary characteristics.

What these are is open to question. But leaving aside the secondary characteristics, such as the romanticist's commitments to freedom, to individualism, to irrationalism, etc., certainly one of his primary characteristics is his hang-up between man's power and man's misery, between the vision of glory and the experience of degradation. “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.” In his youth this was precisely the paradox that Jarrell saw in the world around him: at the top a culture oriented toward tradition and devoted to the methodical delectation of aesthetic splendor, at the bottom a society sick in every member, vitiated by pain and injustice. As the 1930s advanced—Harlan County, Abyssinia, Detroit, Spain—the realities were unmistakable. But so were Jarrell's longings. For years the commonest locution in his poems was the phrase “and yet …” uttered sometimes wistfully, sometimes mordantly, sometimes in hollow despair.

To surmount this impasse the romanticist seeks a faith, or at least a synthesis, which will define and accommodate both sides of the paradox. Historically speaking, few have managed it, especially among the poets. Probably the commonest way out has been through radical social action, based on Hegelian concepts of history. For poets a surer but much more difficult course has been the ascent from romantic agony to genuine tragic vision, which in turn destroys its own romantic base by imposing upon it the classical order of the tragic world. The great example, of course, is Goethe. In our own time we have the smaller but very instructive case of Theodore Roethke. He began with a verbal and mental style different from Jarrell's, granted, but with much the same poetic materials, the same view of nature and human reality; but he converted them into an at least sporadically consistent tragic vision. Roethke continued to write with more and more depth of feeling until he died, while Jarrell, almost exactly contemporary, dwindled away into fragments and exercises.

Not that Jarrell didn't try. Social action was effectively denied him, since his connection with the amorphous, self-doubting radicalism of the Partisan Review was doomed from the start to futility. Apparently conventional religious faith was also inaccessible to him. But he tried other means of escape, especially by pursuing romantic revulsion to its logical ends in dream and fantasy. Time and again he constructed elaborate dream visions, Germanic—not to say Gothic—in style, from within which he looked out at the “dream” of the waking world and denounced it. But the stress of actuality always supervened. Jarrell was sane, excruciatingly sane, and he could never secure his dream beyond the limits of a few separate, though quite splendid, poems.

Similarly he tried, but only half-heartedly, to commit himself to the mystique of creative impunity, to the expressionistic anti-world of style and imagination; he tried to give himself, not to the meretricious elites of Gottfried Benn and Wyndham Lewis (he was too radical for that) but to the commonalty of alienated poets—troubadours, dandies—preserved against social, moral and metaphysical blight by the self-sustaining integrity of their creative endeavor. In a few passages he sounds surprisingly like Vachel Lindsay. But it is noteworthy that Jarrell's most consistent statement of these ideas occurs in neither his poetry nor his criticism but in a story for children, The Bat Poet. He didn't believe it himself. Jarrell simply could not forgo the exquisite anguish of his dual attachment to vision and experience. In the end he was left in the wilderness of romantic nihilism with no base but sensibility.

The results are evident. In his criticism Jarrell gave us vibrant readings of individual poets, Frost, Williams and others, but no theoretical statement of importance. In the last twenty years of his poetry, although the dream poems and a few others are interesting, he fell more and more into fragmentary utterance, false starts, scraps and notes, and into set pieces—“story poems” and “character poems,” updated Robert Frost—that lacked the verve of his youthful work. Then, too, there was the endless translating and retranslating of the German poets, especially Rilke. What Jarrell needed, apparently, in order to write successfully, was an occasion which gave him not only the reality of an episode and the framework in which to place it but a certain distance from the complexity of the ordinary world; and the only sustained occasion of this kind which occurred in his life was World War II. Jarrell's war poems are his best in every sense. They are the most alive poetically, the most consistent thematically.

All this is what I have thought for some years, and in reading The Complete Poems I find it confirmed. The book would be a melancholy monument at best. Here is Randall Jarrell complete and completed, the same Randall Jarrell who so enlivened our literary and social consciences only a short time ago; at least the time must seem short to readers of my generation. Now he is stuffed in a great fat tome, for the dusty corner of a low shelf, to be looked at once and then forgotten. Well, the poems deserve far better. Some of them are great.

The book contains all Jarrell's poems from his previous books, plus three additional sections: one for new work written between his last book and his death, a second for poems published in magazines but not previously collected, the third for earlier unpublished poems. It is, we are made to understand, complete. But curiously it is the only book of its kind that I know in which we discover no hint of the person upon whose authority we are to accept either its completeness or its other attributions; it has no editor; which accounts for the unusual form of the headnote to this review. I have given the bibliographical data as they appear on the title page, and nothing further can be learned from the book or its dust jacket.

We have, then, a considerable bulk of poetry, in which the war poems make a distinct, superior unit. They are not many, perhaps thirty or forty altogether, but even if they were fewer they would be a remarkable achievement. How anyone could write while soldiering is difficult to understand; as one who went through the war unable to write a word, I can only marvel. But Jarrell had been writing for nearly ten years before America entered the war. His early poems are sometimes mannered or imitative, and often artificially opaque; but from the first, as nearly as one can tell, he wrote with ease, and suffered none of the verbal embarrassment customary among young poets. When the war came he already possessed a developed poetic vocabulary and a mastery of forms. Under the shock of war his mannerisms fell away. He began to write with stark, compressed lucidity.

Nowadays we commonly hear critics declare that World War II produced no memorable poetry. Even a critic as acute as George Steiner has said that the poetry of 1940-45 is without “the control of remembrance achieved by Robert Graves or Sassoon” in 1914-18 (The Death of Tragedy). To this I can only reply that if I know what “control of remembrance” means, in my experience the poems of Jarrell have it, and they have it pre-eminently. I am certain that other readers of my age, those who were there, find in these poems of soldiers and civilians, the dead, wounded and displaced, the same truth that I do.

Warfare gave Jarrell the antagonist he needed; not fate, not history, not the state, not metaphysical doubt but all these rolled into one—The War—that brute momentous force sweeping a bewildered generation into pathos, horror and death. Today our young dissenters and resisters sometimes ask us why we didn't resist too, why we were willing to go along with the militarists. Shamefacedly and unsuccessfully, we try to explain that willingness had nothing to do with the matter. But we needn't try; it is all there in Jarrell's poems. Cannot they be republished separately—and cheaply—with a proper introduction and editorial notes where needed? It would be a benefaction to all concerned. The irresistibility of the war, the suffering of its victims, Americans, Germans, Japanese—Jarrell wrote it all with equal understanding, equal humane sympathy. And he wrote it then, there, at that time and in those places, with power, spontaneity and perfect conviction. Against what I have already said about his poetry, I must in basic honesty conclude with an amendment: in his powerful war poems Randall Jarrell did rise, as if in spite of himself and at the command of a classical force outside his own consciousness, to his moment of tragic vision.