Mr. Randall Jarrell's name as a poet and critic is one which in England as in this country carries considerable prestige. One is at a loss therefore to account for the shocking betrayal of poetic responsibilities and, by implication, critical ones exemplified by his third collection of poems.¹ One's perplexity grows when one finds the critics comparing it variously to the work of Browning, Auden and Tennyson, and included with the “great artificers” who “bring us into a world so painfully clarified that it seems there is nothing more to say.” Rarely have I witnessed such a dividing gulf between reputation and achievement. The situation raises fundamental questions concerning poetic and critical standards.

Losses comprises a collection of poems which are mostly spun from what should be the involuntary incidentals of a poem, rather than the poems being made first for the poetic action. Ideally, it is the intensity of the poetic action which sets off and elevates into significance these surrounding incidental values—news, observation, narrative or fiction, etc., or any “subject” separable from the words and alive in its own right. Mr. Jarrell's notes at the end of Losses indicate an almost naive reliance upon such incidentals. For example to explicate a slight, versified ancedote, “O My Name It Is Sam Hall,” Mr. Jarrell obligingly informs, “These men are three American prisoners and one American M.P., at a B-29 training base in Southern Arizona—Davis-Monthan Field, in fact.” Or in explanation of a line of imagery in “Pilots, Man Your Planes,” “… But on the tubes the raiders oscillate: On the radar set, that is; the view plate looks like a cathode-ray oscillograph.” The painstaking documentation of the poems in the notes suggests that Mr. Jarrell believes there is some helpful connection between the reporting of poetic experience and its verifiability in the “real” world.

Behind this dependence on objective documentation there would seem to be a fear of any formal, consciously “made” poetry. As an addition to his intended verisimilitude Mr. Jarrell sprinkles his poems full of little conversational phrases trailing off to dots which, as a device, have a loosening effect upon a poetic line which is, in the first place, conceived at too low-grade a tension. He also employs dashes liberally, although not consistently, sometimes to do the work of commas, other times of periods. The whole would seem to represent a revolt against the “poetic,” an urge to deal with an honest, thorny reality. While the surface of Mr. Jarrell's poetry is self-consciously modern, with all the up-to-date objects of the contemporary war-world—gun-turrets, flak, Jills, Stalags, radar, carriers, hutment, prisoners-of-war, etc.—seeking to create a contemporary fiction, in reality the timbre of the prosodic voice is old-fashioned and laboriously clichéd. Mr. Jarrell talks of “. … the train's long mourning whistle. Wailed from the valley below,” “the last cloud-girdled peak,” the ward is “barred” with moonlight, “the squirrel gnaws mechanically.” Always the texture of the poem is as loose and casual as possible, as though attempting to hide the fact that the words follow each other in an order chosen for any conscious poetic end. So we have a poem. “Money,” starting with (surely a handicap) the extraordinary, certainly-not-nymph-and-shepherd lines:

I sit here eating milk-toast in my lap-robe—
They've got my night-shirt starchier than I told 'em … Huh! …
I'll tell 'em …

The poem, a monologue in dialect which does not succeed in creating its speaker, ends with the banal confession (a banality which is not relieved even if one is conscious of its contrivance for a dramatic purpose):

When my Ma died I boarded with a farmer
In the next county; I 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.
They say that money isn't everything: it isn't;
Money don't help you none when you are sighing
For something else in this wide world to buy …
The first time I couldn't think of anything
I didn't have, it shook me.
                                                                                                              But giving does as well.

In descriptive passages, as for example in the poem “A Country Life,” he piles up the adjectives till the nouns are over-governed and the picture no longer substantially visual:

Or why, for once, the lagging heron
Flaps from the little creak's parched cresses
Across the harsh-grassed, gullied meadow
To the black, rowed evergreens below.

Because most of the poems in Losses deal with a war environment one expects them to contain the antithesis of life and death (that is, both as subjects objectified by the created poem, as well as common subject, by implication, in all poems), yet here they are embossed and studded with capitalized Lifes and Deaths throughout. The word “Life” and the word “Death” are no more help in articulating some vision of life and death than the word “orange.” In fact, they usually serve as an evasion of any valid comment. In one poem, “Burning the Letters,” which otherwise might have been successful, Mr. Jarrell hits the jackpot and litters his pages with the big verities. We have words and phrases like “his Life wells up from death, the death of Man,” “The dying God, the eaten Life,” “The Light flames,” “the unsearchable / Death of the lives lies dark upon the life,” “eternal life,” “O death of all my life” (there are nine mentions of life in the poem) and “O grave.” O what a defeaning organ-peal of the pseudo-profound. The voice which might have led us nearer the mysteries of life and death is lost in the noise. I had supposed the snare of the old abstract poetic gear would be more cunningly handled by a poet of Mr. Jarrell's training. Here he allows the poem to dissolve into “vague immensities.”

Where Mr. Jarrell is influenced by Robert Frost, a poet to whom he has paid critical tribute, his work reveals a simple, old-fashioned nostalgia and these poems work successfully at a humble magnitude. “The Breath Of Night” falls into this category. It begins

The moon rises. The red cubs rolling
In the ferns by the rotten oak
Stare over a marsh and a meadow
To the farm's white wisp of smoke.

But, it should be noticed, the final stanza effects an overtly moral dimension similar to that in Hardy's Satires of Circumstance. For, as a matter of fact, Mr. Jarrell is more obligated to Hardy's small dramatic framework of incident than he is to Browning's interest in character or Frost's effectively restrained sermonizing. Still, when he remembers the deceptively homely but polished verse of Frost, he can achieve a pleasant simplicity, as in “A Country Life”:

A bird that I don't know,
Hunched on his light-pole like a scarecrow,
Looks sideways out into the wheat
The wind waves under the waves of heat.
The field is yellow as egg-bread dough
Except where …

There is a less hysterical “realism” in the careful observation of these details than in the more violent war poems. Unfortunately, however, such observation gives way towards the poem's end to Mr. Jarrell's reliance upon the worn-out poetic diction of lines like:

The shadows lengthen, and a dreaming hope
Breathes, from the vague mound, Life;
From the grove under the spire
Stars shine, and a wandering light
Is kindled for the mourner, man.
The angel kneeling with the wreath
Sees, in the moonlight, graves.

Perhaps the most successful poem in Losses is “A Camp in the Prussian Forest.” It is a quiet, slow-paced description of a death camp. The action or the scene behind the poem, the incidental news which is contained in the poem, is moving as a good newspaper report of horror is moving. But few words in the poem are positioned to create that flash of vision which in its quality incorporates the “news” of the poem, but which is so much more than just that. When this does happen, as in stanza six, the effect is liberating:

I paint the star I sawed from yellow pine
And plant the sign
In soil that does not yet refuse
Its usual Jews

Here it is the word “usual” which, in its proximity to “Jews” (the musical half-chime should be mentioned) adds a philosophical dimension to what, up to that point, has been a statement made at a level of personal compassion.

Losses represents a retreat from the small eminence achieved by Mr. Jarrell's second collection, Little Friend, Little Friend. If his “modernity” has led him into an over-strategic attempt to resuscitate certain discarded poetic modes and intentions in the ordering of contemporary experience, I can only point out that the job has been much better done by poets of World War I like Owen, Read, Grenfell and Rosenberg. If Losses were a book by an unknown young poet, one would not consider it worth reviewing. Keeping in mind the reputation of Randall Jarrell, I find it a disappointing and baffling experience.

Note

1. Losses, by Randall Jarrell. Harcourt Brace.