Freedom, farewell! Or so the soldiers say;
And all the freedoms they spent yesterday
Lure from beyond the graves, a war away.
The cropped skulls resonate the wistful lies
Of dead civilians: truth, reason, justice;
The foolish ages haunt their unaccepting eyes.
From the green gloom of the untroubled seas
Their little bones (the coral of the histories)
Foam into marches, exultation, victories:
Who will believe the blood curled like a moan
From the soaked lips, a century from home—
The slow lives sank from being like a dream?

Randall Jarrell, who died last autumn in what seems clearly to have been a tragic accident, was in many ways the wonder and terror of American poetry during the late 40's and early 50's. Like Shelley, as Robert Lowell fondly describes him after a friendship of thirty years, in his “harsh luminosity,” he could glide for days against the sun, swooping down every so often with murderous effect on the warblers and thrushes. Not many readers knew where to find him, or indeed sometimes, to their dismay, where not to find him. After the publication of his novel, Pictures from an Institution, in 1952, and his critical collection, Poetry and the Age, in 1955, books so amusing, high-spirited, accurate, and original that they often confirmed an easy prejudice (of which I have been guilty) that he was a better critic than poet, he apparently retired to his private Weimar at Greensboro, North Carolina, to teach, write poetry, prefaces, children's books—seemingly a domesticated lion. To say that he had been a disturbing figure during his years as poetry editor of the Nation would be a rash understatement. Not since Poe had an American poet of his distinction laid down the law in quite such a carnival spirit. He reached maturity at the climax of the New-Critical era, whose excesses he both relished and deplored with brilliant finality, and could not have been the kind of poet he was had he not been an equally good critic. To look back on his ascendancy when the connective tissue between the beauty and maganimity of much of his writing and the bacchic exhilaration of his rejections and dislikes may have been hard to discern—impossible for a few of his unlucky victims—is, for me, to rediscover how quickly he had won my trust without my knowing exactly why, and how much in his debt many of us were.

There were two peaks, at the beginning and end of his public life, when his full quality was active in his poetry. I agree entirely with Lowell that “His gifts, both by nature and by a lifetime of hard dedication and growth, were wit, pathos, and brilliance of intelligence. These qualities, dazzling in themselves, were often so well employed that he became, I think, the most heart-breaking English poet of his generation.” He made his debut as a war poet of astonishing poise and fullness for so young a man; for several older critics who had recognized his quality immediately and done it justice, but who lost him in the radical-pastoral, romantically nostalgic, bitter-sweet idylls of his middle career, Randell Jarrell remained the poet of the war.

Returning to the war poems twenty years after their appearance in Blood for a Stranger, Little Friend, Little Friend, and Losses, is something of a revelation. I had taken them in, a few whole poems and many wonderfully effective images, but had somehow missed the magnificence they have for me now, perhaps vaguely expecting an equal magnificence from another poet in a style more congenial to my experience of the war. There was no other poet, none who came within shouting distance of Jarrell. That he had been, like Whitman, very lucky in his circumstances, neither too far in the fighting nor too far out, a true airman in every figurative sense, and even better prepared by genius and training to render the particulars of war by diffraction from a radically civilized and simple philosophy (or “strategy,” if you prefer John Crowe Ransom's hallowed term)—all this was obscured from some of us who had been closer to the action and wore a veteran's foolish pride not quite lightly enough, forgetting that the civilian Whitman and Melville had been the Civil War poets, resisting a repetition of the mud-soaked griefs of Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg in World War I, looking perhaps for poetry more in the jaunty style of Howard Nemerov in America or Keith Douglas in England; something abrupt and hard-bitten, steeped in romantic disillusion and military slang; brief, sweeping, dismissive ironies, like the crushing out of a last cigarette before takeoff.

By 1945 everyone knew what the motto of the war had been … hurry up and wait. Jarrell knew it. But the long patience of outfacing a worn-out myth of heroism took, on the surface where most war poetry gets written, a very different form in the average serviceman's mind than it did in Jarrell's. For the soldier, the flyer, especially the carrier-based flyer (I had been a ship's-company gunner on a carrier for the last year in the Pacific), it was a matter of killing boredom by devotion to the technical niceties of the job, for which we were truly but ambiguously grateful. Nothing in my ship's distant engagements with the Japanese (we were protected by an immense screen of other ships) matched, for ship's-company gunners, the excitement of shooting down drone planes with our ultra-new, line-of-fire-radar fire-control system hot off Norbert Wiener's drawing board at M.I.T. I realize now that only Jarrell's poetry was equal to expressing the weird congeries of horrors and distractions the war became in its final months; yet, on the “front,” we lacked either the whole heart or the whole mind to make his splendidly simple sense of it. As possible poets, he judges us retrospectively among the losses.

The idea grew, therefore, among younger readers that he had taken the soft option for a poet of the 40's, had been culpably sentimental, even patronizing. He had moved backward to the pitying spirit of Owen and behind that to the radically pessimistic, panoramic, world-historical spirit of Hardy, or the great, scathing war episodes in Byron's Don Juan. What one least expected, I think, was this intensely private, learned, sure, ready voice of Jarrell, sounding now like Hardy's Ancient Spirit of the Years, Spirit of the Pities, Spirits Sinister and Ironic (of The Dynasts), now in the high Parnassian of some Lecomte de Lisle of the prairies, now pathetic to the verge of baby-talk, now ferociously graphic. Above all, it took time to absorb the poems' general monotony of effect, the mind they make, their static grandeur of sentience. A ground-tone of swaying iambics varied by spondees and syncopation, paired and tripled adjectives in wistful or angry clumps, a recurring litany of abstractions: the State, the States, Death, Dream, fire, the years, the cities—the soldier-prisoner-patient, his wife, mail, and cat. A fastidiously inhibited poet, finding in a world gone nearly insane with distraction the “blind” certainties of unlettered feeling he had recently absorbed from Whitman, Hardy, and Rilke; a very American epic of acceptance. No poet was better prepared, these peculiarities notwithstanding, to swallow the war whole, to make it his, to provide so many vivid, oblique glimpses of an existence whose official aspect he knew all too well.

What was it, then, that saved him from drowning in his influences and gave him strength to extend a powerful arc of vision over the Second World War to Korea, Vietnam, and the new age of technocratic wars? Firsthand knowledge, of course, as a land-based flight instructor who had flown himself, but more essentially, a passion to make the reader see, to concentrate his whole moral effort in an act of sight, leaving to “philosophy” those tenuous exchanges of condition and role—Life into Death into Dream into Death again—that encompass his plain, original, very poetic idea of knowledge.

I quote two of the best short poems that show his movement from a masterly but still fairly traditional pathos to a full-scale pathos of concrete vision:

“A FIELD HOSPITAL”

He stirs, beginning to awake.
A kind of ache
Of knowing troubles his blind warmth; he moans,
And the high hammering drone
Of the first crossing fighters shakes
His sleep to pieces, rakes
The darkness with its skidding bursts, is done.
All that he has known
Floods in upon him; but he dreads
The crooked thread
Of fire upon the darkness: “The great drake
Flutters to the icy lake—
The shotguns stammer in my head.
I lie in my own bed,”
He whispers, “dreaming”; and he thinks to wake.
The old mistake.
A cot creaks; and he hears the groan
He thinks his own—
And groans, and turns his stitched, blind, bandaged head
Up to the tent-flap, red
With dawn. A voice says, “Yes, this one”;
His arm stings; then, alone,
He neither knows, remembers—but instead
Sleeps, comforted.

“A FRONT”

Fog over the base: the beams ranging
From the five towers pull home from the night
The crews cold in fur, the bombers banging
Like lost trucks down the levels of the ice.
A glow drifts in like mist (how many tons of it?),
Bounces to a roll, turns suddenly to steel
And tires and turrets, huge in the trembling light.
The next is high, and pulls up with a wail,
Comes round again—no use. And no use for the rest
In drifting circles out along the range;
Holding no longer, changed to a kinder course,
The flights drone southward through the steady rain.
The base is closed. … But one voice keeps on calling,
The lowering pattern of the engines grows;
The roar gropes downward in its shaky orbit
For the lives the season quenches. Here below
They beg, order, are not heard; and hear the darker
Voice rising: Can't you hear me? Over. Over—
All the air quivers, and the east sky glows.

I have avoided those somewhat coercive adjectives, “tender” and “compassionate,” not, God knows, that the poetry is not all of both in an ultimate sense, but because in the best poems these qualities are so much the whole story that it seems indecent to mention them, extended beyond the usual limits to literally everything; men, machines, landscape, women, children—everything. He moves beyond the avuncular-idyllic manner of Whitman's Drum-Taps, beyond the lovable Kipling fantasy of marching, camp-fires, and taverns, beyond even the comradeliness of Owen, to a place that mixes pity and philosophy, exact knowledge of war and sympathy for its victims, on a grand scale; a fresh visionary tension. The air force is the new military elite. In addition to its usual disciplines, it seems to foster an anarchy of spirit that begets its own antidote—distaste for war—more readily than earlier kinds of militarism. After the first Futurist inanities of Italian flyers over Ethiopia, no airman has, to my knowledge, written anything good that might be construed as glamorizing war. What Jarrell imagined with great clarity and force was this final detachment of the flyer, the dumb animism of his life among the planes and the planes' lives among themselves, the rarefaction and dissolution of most of the earth-bound certitudes of earlier wars. He thereby gives us a new measure of war altogether, in spite of the persistence of its older forms.

I remember being shown on the carrier a movie in color about carriers called The Fighting Lady, some of it shot earlier from my gun mount. It had a sickly sweetness around the edges that must have revolted Jarrell if he saw the film at home, as I imagine he did. His splendid long poem, “Pilots, Man Your Planes,” is a demonstration of how the same thing should be done. Here are the last eleven lines:

The planes fly off looking for a carrier,
Destroyers curve in their long hunting arcs
Through the dead of the carrier: the dazed, vomiting,
Oil-blackened and fire-blistered, saved or dying men
Cling with cramped shaking fingers to the lines
Lowered from their old life: the pilot
Drugged in a blanket, straining up to gulp
From the mug that scrapes like chalk against his mouth,
Knows, knows at last; he yawns the chattering yawn
Of effort and anguish, of hurt hating helplessness—
Yawns sobbingly, his head falls back, he sleeps.

This reaching back for an older mode of writing about war was also a reaching forward to the solitary terrors of the “small-scale” professional wars to come, fought by the new soldier-technician with his elaborately absorbing gear, somewhere beneath the headlines about burning Caribbean cruise ships and the almost normal politics and holidays of home. It is a world where islands on a map are dragons, where planes are “green, made beasts run home to air,” where the soldier is set before a blackboard to learn, “the rifle steady at (his) back, / The functions of a variable: to die.” In other words, a pure and evil irrationality. The poet's deepest pity is for what these clumsy mechanical animals and their child-guardians might become in rational circumstances, free of the ugly necessity, at just this time and place, of a fire-birth into mere legend.