All poets inevitably inhabit mental landscapes, if one may enlarge the word “landscape” to include sea, sky, towns, and the waste land. Today it is strikingly apparent that American poets inhabit a landscape entirely different in time and place from that of European poets. The Europeans inhabit a landscape of disintegration; and their reactions are mainly either to accept and express disintegration or to transcend it by creating an interior, spiritual landscape of the mind. For Americans, on the other hand, their landscape is still the overwhelming actuality of their physical surroundings, their physical presence in the world. The American poet does not just create them; he clutches with desperation at his visual images as at straws in the midst of an ocean of immense isolation where he fears to be drowned. The remarkable originality of American writing is disconcerting to the rest of the world: because it is not at all sought out, it is the originality of the obvious, the external, the physical in enormous variety in a world where the rest of civilization seems dying. And the acuteness of the contrast is emphasized by the fact that America is involved in that death also.

It is important to point out this difference of background, for unless one is aware of it one falls into the more obvious stupidities which make most contemporary criticism of contemporary poetry wearisome. Unless one accepts the basic fact that we inhabit different worlds and epochs, one wastes a great amount of time. Witness the weary cock-crowing of the American literary reviews over English decline written in that critical vocabulary which is so deeply indebted to the stock-market reports, or witness the denigration of American poetry as external by English writers.

Mr. Jarrell's landscape is certainly the American one, and the first thing which strikes a European as odd is the relation of the material to the title of his new book. Mr. Jarrell's losses are not the center of his landscape: they are all at the edge, mostly on foreign soil, seen from an aeroplane. What gives his poetry its extraordinary cohesion and strength is the sense of a resolute, sharp-featured landscape, with the dreadful scene taking place on the islands, beyond the hills, out at sea, in the sky:

In the level light, over the fiery shores,
The plane circles stubbornly: the eyes distending
With hatred and misery and longing, stare
Over the blackening ocean for a corpse.
The fires are guttering; the dials fall,
A long dry shudder climbs along his spine,
His fingers tremble; but his hard unchanging stare
Moves unacceptingly: I have a friend.

That is precisely the situation—the corpse which is hard to find but which is nevertheless the corpse of a friend. There is an ambiguity about Mr. Jarrell's losses: they are real losses, but the body has not been found.

There is a parallel in this situation with the English Victorian writers, and, strange as it may seem, Mr. Jarrell often reminds me of Tennyson and Browning. Or rather this will not seem strange if I quote from “Orestes at Tauris,” which is a long, odd failure, merging into the language of prize poems with which the English Victorian writers once took the stage:

So she looked; and yet in all that press
At Argos or Mycenae, or in all the isles
You never saw her like: a face so fair!
She wet your hair, and smoothed it with her hands,
Water ran down your face, and it looked pale
Under those dark and darkening locks; you shook them free,
And how ghastly it looked—your pale anxious face!

This is Victorian Prize Poetry with a big V and two big P's, and to judge from Mr. Jarrell's remarks about Henry Reed when he does the same thing considerably better, I cannot believe that Mr. Jarrell himself likes it.

But I do not mean this when I associate Mr. Jarrell with Tennyson and Browning. I am thinking rather of these writers at their most idiomatic and best and in what was surely their strongest moral relation to their time. For example, of Tennyson when he wrote the “Northern Farmer,” a dialect poem about the northerner's obsession with “propputty” which makes the same point as Mr. Jarrell's “Money” with its ending:

When my ma died I boarded with a farmer
In the next county; used to think of her,
And I looked round me, as I could,
And I saw what it added up to: money.
Now I'm dying—I can't call this living—
I haven't any cause to change my mind.

Other poems remind me of Browning in the mood of “The Italian in England”:

When I woke the rabbit was gnawing
His great, slow, ragged bites
From the wood of the wired-in hutches,
And dusk had grayed the white
Leghorns hunched on the roofs of their run.
The train mourned below
For the captives—a thinning echo …
It all comes back to me now.

This has the elastic resilience which is Browningesque in the spirit which transcends mere imitation. The reasons for this resemblance lie indeed in a certain parallelism between the situation of Victorian England and that of America today. For America the sympathy with the victims of Nazism corresponded more closely to the sympathy felt by Browning with the Italian liberals than to the feelings of a contemporary European in the same situation. But of course there is an added element of grimness and horror. “A Camp in the Prussian Forest” has the elasticity, the jauntiness even, of Browning, but the confidence has become bitter and ironic:

I walk beside the prisoners to the road.
Load on puffed load,
Their corpses, stacked like sodden wood,
Lie barred or galled with blood. …

This poem is perhaps the most completely successful in the volume, and for proof I quote the ending, because often it is the directly expressed emotion which reveals an uncertainty on the level of feeling in Jarrell (though—as the wrapper of this book witnesses—other critics pay unstinting praise to his “cold hatred,” or his being “tragic, witty, profoundly tender,” revealing “inconsolable love,” and so on).

But the ending of “A Camp in the Prussian Forest” really has an unaffected emotional force:

The needles of the wreath are chalked with ash,
A filmy trash
Litters the black woods with the death
Of men; and one last breath
Curls from the monstrous chimney …
                    I laugh aloud
Again and again;
The star laughs from its rotting shroud
Of flesh. O star of men!

Perhaps the laughing aloud here has a little of that meretricious quality of “cold hatred” which appears more impressive today than it may in twenty years' time. But the “O star of men” is that which is most genuine in Randall Jarrell, a real feeling for humanity, despite the over-insistent irony. It is this that makes him, besides being a poet with a language of his own—as distinctive in its way as that of Robert Lowell—a mind of first-rate intelligence in his work, preoccupied with the question of the nature of man. That preoccupation, after all, bridges the gulf of our widely separated environments in the world today and explains why it is that Mr. Jarrell is eminently a “modern” involved in the same problems of humanity as Rilke, and Eluard, and London writers who seem not to have at all influenced his literary sensibility. His strength no doubt lies in putting them aside and working resolutely in the American visual tradition. This makes his criticism one-sided, but for a poet, the prejudice that makes his poetry is more important than the justice which makes his criticism.