… Examining our own age, one feels that Mr. Randall Jarrell has most profitably integrated experiences derived from its widest clash of forces, World War II. In his Collected Poems one third of the material is associated directly with war, a category where he has made notable contributions to our aesthetic life. We accept with unquestioning faith military camps and airfields so accurately fixed: “sand roads, tar-paper barracks, / The bubbling asphalt of the runways, sage, / The dunes rising to the interminable ranges, / The dim flights moving over clouds like clouds.”

This is the setting, dusty, depersonalized, which Mr. Jarrell has studied in order to dramatize the puzzlement of his nameless warriors. The central reality of this world is death. “It was not dying: everybody died,” we read in “Losses,” where he traces American fliers from student days to operational missions, burning “The cities we had learned about in school— / Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among / The people we had killed and never seen.” The most striking note about this language is its authentic yet paralyzing impersonality. “They said, ‘Here are the maps’; we burned the cities.” Where attention is fixed on briefing rooms, where the enemy is represented only by sprawling shapes below in the dark, the natural desire is to seek some remedy which will deaden thought. A limbo, where one accepts insensitiveness in order to survive pain, is the central locale of Randall Jarrell's poetry. Anonymity is precious because only through its help can one avoid remorse. Geographical notation figures centrally: one wants to know where one is, physically if not spiritually. Terrain absolves the mind from other, more far-reaching missions. When the inescapable question of death intrudes, we keep it at arm's length by aligning it with the “job.”

In our new planes, with our new crews, we bombed
The ranges by the desert or the shore,
Fired at towed targets, waited for our scores—
And turned into replacements and woke up
One morning, over England, operational.
It wasn't different: but if we died
It was not an accident but a mistake
(But an easy one for anyone to make.)
We read our mail and counted up our missions—
In bombers named for girls. …

The authority of a speaking voice resides here: controlled with difficulty, hollow with overpowering solitude. Mr. Jarrell has told us that his poems are meant to be said aloud: many are dramatic speeches or scenes. Images remain relatively uncomplicated, growing out of the military subject. “In works of art almost anything stands for more than itself,” he believes; “but this more, like Lohengrin, vanishes when it names itself.” Commonly the brutal situation assures that one will be wrenched into a posture of recognition, as in the death of a gunner: “I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. / When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.” An inferno quality vibrates here appallingly: the anonymous youth curled in pathetic imitation of the womb, his bloody fur freezing in arctic air six miles above earth, a limp mass to be removed as one might wash away spilt gasoline.

While admitting this much, we remind ourselves that a central difficulty of such writing, born of public disasters and the extinction of personality, is that sometimes dramatic moment is forfeited. “Port of Embarkation,” for example, describes soldiers who respond to freedoms that “Lure from beyond the graves, a war away.” “The cropped skulls resonate the wistful lies / Of dead civilians. …” Implications of death in the skull are widened by the “green gloom of the untroubled seas” which will accept “Their little bones (the coral of the histories)” as they “Foam into marches, exultation, victories. …” At first the skein of ironies is adequately fleshed: soldiers armed with the facile epigrams of elder statesmen; heedless seas which will obscure mutilated corpses, distorting them into textbook footnotes; remains of the dead that become coral accretions of some future, equally false explanation. But as we continue, references have broadened beyond the area supported by earlier drama. One arrives finally at a stage of vacuous abstraction: marches, victories.

It is apparent that Randall Jarrell seeks the reconciliation of tragedy, but his absorption with larger canvases has sometimes led to what we may term the fallacy of unsubstantiated melancholy. Commonly he invokes a world of the very young, too frail and naive to comprehend terrors, or a world of the very old, where individuals cannot reconcile themselves to their final trek. A text with a civilian background, unable to profit from drama latent in wartime, uncovers this facet. “A Utopian Journey” (facile irony arouses suspicion at the outset) describes the waiting room of a physician. A sick humanity admirably expresses Jarrell's view of existence, where patients in our cosmic mental hospital delude themselves that they will someday win a game of checkers played against faceless keepers.

          … here in this office
The natural perplexities of their existence,
The demands they can neither satisfy nor understand.
Are reduced to the child's, “I hurt,” the bare
Intention of any beast: to go on being.

Patients, mute, abashed, “go out to the hospitals, sanatoria, or graves / He prescribes. …” They are frightened by the “masked unnoticing / Faces of their saviors …,” obsessed most of all with the “Sweet smell of nothing. …” No one may accuse Randall Jarrell of avoiding the “long war, lost war” which transcends political formalities. He has carefully charted the unnerving insecurity of the modern condition, with its recently past and abysmally present terrors, its veterans' hospitals, ragged formations of sick and disabled shuttling up and down the back streets of five continents. Yet it may be left for us to observe one further irony in this writer, who has so minutely examined public scenes. I refer to the sometimes unprofitable note of repressive scholarship which John Aldridge has felt to constitute an increasingly negative device in university writing. Nor can Mr. Jarrell be entirely absolved from the charge. One wonders to what extent this impulse colors the nervous lists of books which clutter certain of his admirable critical essays? “I have tried to make my poems plain,” Mr. Jarrell has admitted, “and most of them are plain enough; but I wish that they were more difficult because I had known more.” A mistake operates here which equates esoteric detail with genuinely absorbed experience. One example occurs in the notes for “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” where surely it provides no information necessary for the text to know that attacking fighters “were armed with cannon firing explosive shells,” and that the hose “was a steam hose.”