In reviewing the new books of verse, Randall Jarrell has tortured so many poets and made such entertaining jokes while they squirmed on the rack that one admires his superb foolhardiness in publishing a book of his own.¹ It is as if Jeffreys, the hanging judge, had voluntarily put himself on trial. Will his maimed victims now cluster round him to cry “Blood! Blood from this stranger”? And the scores he has condemned to oblivion, sometimes merely because he didn't like the color of their metaphors—will this be the moment when they reach out for him with their wraithlike arms and drag him into the common grave?

But no, Blood for a Stranger has been praised by most of its reviewers, and I might add that the praise is largely justified. Jarrell is a skillful poet, he has almost too many things to say, and at times he bares his breast so trustingly that it would be a shame for any critic to use it as a pin-cushion. And yet, considering that he has been implacable in exposing the secret debts of other poets; that he has revealed what this one owes to Yeats, what that one borrowed from Crane or Auden, you can hardly refrain from pointing out that his own verse is as full of echoes as the great Mormon tabernacle.

Thus, “London,” the second poem in his book, begins like T. S. Eliot (see the song of the second nymph in Part III of “The Waste Land”), continues like Mother Goose and ends with a couplet remembered from Poem XXII of W. H. Auden's first collection. Auden had written:

If we really want to live, we'd better start at once to try;
If we don't, it doesn't matter, but we'd better start to die.

In Jarrell's version, this becomes:

And yet at last, man, you must learn to live,
Though you want nothing but to die.

The fourth poem, “90 North,” seems to have been suggested by Stephen Spender's “Polar Exploration,” although it takes a different turn at the end.

The fifth poem, “A Story,” has the unmistakable Auden atmosphere of the tragic schoolroom. In form it is a sestina, a difficult verse pattern that Auden was among the first to revive.

Poem 19, “Love in Its Separate Being,” is Auden again—in its general treatment, in its deliberately false rhymes and even in specific phrases like “Love's logical obsessive face,” and “From the tamer, the crammer, the trainer,” and “By bare shires and foreign shores.” The word “shires,” when borrowed by a Tennessee poet, is something that gets under my skin like a chigger.

Poem 25, “The Automaton,” is a nightmare of war that must have been inspired by Wilfred Owen's “The Show.”

Poem 35, “A Description of Some Confederate Dead,” is a briefer and more violent reworking of Allen Tate's fine “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” with nothing added.

Poem 43, “The Skaters,” resembles some of Hart Crane's delirious visions, though here the exact debt in meter and metaphor is harder to define. Perhaps the poem comes closest to the final stanzas of “The Dance,” which is Section II, Part 4, of “The Bridge.”

Poem 45, “Variations,” reminds me of Yeats, and especially of “Three Things” and the songs by Crazy Jane. But this again is a fainter resemblance which I mention only because there are other echoes of Yeats in the book.

Jarrell in some of his reviews seemed to imply that it was a despicable and stupid act for one poet to borrow so much as a phrase from another. I wouldn't use his words against him, even if I could remember them, for I feel that every poet should learn what he can, from any source in life or letters. If poetry, besides being an incommunicable art, were not also a craft to be studied, then we could scarcely speak of English or American literature, since we should have nothing but an aggregate of individual expressions, a medley of cries in the night. But borrowing should be a conscious process. The trouble with Jarrell is that he sometimes echoes other poets without being conscious of his debt; it is as if some of their meters and images, some of their favorite situations, had gained an obsessive power over his mind. These debts of his are quite different from those acknowledged by T. S. Eliot in the footnotes to “The Waste Land,” where he insists on letting us know that line 20, for example, is copied from Ezekiel II, i, and line 60 was suggested by Baudelaire's fourmillante cité. I doubt that Jarrell would be able to define his full debt to Auden, and he might deny that he owes anything to Hart Crane. Yet when he writes—

How long we pled our love!
How thorough our embrace!
By post and igloo, we prolonged
The night and splendors of our kiss

—I cannot help turning back to “The Dance,” and I cannot help feeling that Crane did exactly the same thing, did it first and did it with more conviction.

And that explains something else that is wrong with Jarrell's echoes: they are less distinct than the original songs. Being instinctively a fine critic, he has chosen as models several of the greatest poems of our time, and in spite of his skill he never once equals them—not “The Waste Land” or “The Bridge” or “Songs for Music Perhaps”; not even Auden's lines addressed to Englishmen of good families, which are far from being his best. All these poems express convictions of which Jarrell approves highly, convictions that haunt him, forcing him to add his voice to the original voices; but they are not after all his own convictions.

Sometimes, for that reason, he fails to express them clearly. Almost all his models are difficult poets to understand, but all of them (except perhaps Crane) have a central core of belief—in Auden it is the need for psychological health; in Eliot it is sin and redemption; in Wilfred Owen it is the utter senselessness of war. The result is that each of their poems casts light on everything else they wrote, until a definite picture emerges from the shadows. In Jarrell, who combines their effects without really sharing their beliefs, it is as if the fragments of several great mosaics were shaken together and rearranged into no pattern at all.

If this were the whole truth about Blood for a Stranger, there would be no excuse for discussing it at such length. But besides being the accomplished echo of other poets (of other Narcissi, I came near saying, in memory of the legend) he is also a poet in his own right; he is even several poets. Among them I would distinguish a Jeremiah prophesying—or perhaps merely recording with great imaginative power—the catastrophic end of modern times. I would distinguish a swaggering rhetorician who, when he wants to mention a sharecropper's cabin where people are born, live and die in the same room, has to stop and search for the appropriate gongorism. He ends by calling it “the board cave lined with newspapers where, in one thoroughly used room, are initiated, persevered in, and annihilated, the forbidding ranges of the bewildered and extravagant responses of the cell.” That is a mouthful even for our Euphues, a poet who ought to be kept on a lean diet, with no after-dinner tropes. But there is also a fourth poet to be distinguished in Jarrell's book: a young man wounded by life, intense and honest in his feelings, hesitant about revealing them, then at last coming forward to offer his blood for a stranger. He is my favorite, even though the others are sometimes better craftsmen. But if all four poets decided to pool their resources, their wit, their taste, their savage learning, their intensity, their vision of disaster, then we should have not echoes but the Poem.

Note

1. Blood for a Stranger, by Randall Jarrell. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. 92 pages.