Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #315155 in Books
• Published on: 1981-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 520 pages

Review
"I believe that Randall Jarrell will have something to say to people for a very long time to come, especially as the world tries increasingly to survive by inhumanity. . . . His poems give you the feel of a time, our time, as no other poet of [the twentieth] century does."--James Dickey

"What Jarrell's inner life really was in all its wonder, variety, and subtlety is best told in his poetry. . . . Always behind the sharpened edge of his lines, there is the merciful vision, his vision . . . an illumination of life, too sad and radiant for us to stay with long--or forget."--Robert Lowell

"Jarrell is the one poet of my generation who made an art of American speech as it is, who advanced beyond Frost in using not only a contemporary idiom but the actual rhythms of our speech. No other poet of our time has embalmed the common dialogue of Americans with such mastery."--Karl Shapiro
-- Review

Review
"I believe that Randall Jarrell will have something to say to people for a very long time to come, especially as the world tries increasingly to survive by inhumanity. . . . His poems give you the feel of a time, our time, as no other poet of [the twentieth] century does."--James Dickey"What Jarrell's inner life really was in all its wonder, variety, and subtlety is best told in his poetry. . . . Always behind the sharpened edge of his lines, there is the merciful vision, his vision . . . an illumination of life, too sad and radiant for us to stay with long--or forget."--Robert Lowell"Jarrell is the one poet of my generation who made an art of American speech as it is, who advanced beyond Frost in using not only a contemporary idiom but the actual rhythms of our speech. No other poet of our time has embalmed the common dialogue of Americans with such mastery."--Karl Shapiro

Customer Reviews

America's Great Poet of WWII
A great poem ought to be huge - grand in scope, but not necessarily excessive in length. Great poetry should tell massive stories with multiple layers concisely and artfully. One doesn't need obscure references, convoluted language, nor self-congratulatory internal winkings. Poetry is supposed to be honest. A great poem should pack a serious punch of power and style and insight.

It's a complicated world and life is complex, confusing, and manifestly difficult to fathom. Poetry is at its best when it illustrates and even explains something of life and humanity in a form that is reachable and readily understood, entertaining and impressive. Overly complex poetry tends to be more a demonstration of the art and poet rather than anything that might tend to educate, enlighten, or entertain the reader.

I've heaped praise and criticism on the Nashville Fugitives. I believe the finest Civil War poem of the 20th century is by one of them - "Lee in the Mountains", by Donald Davidson. Conversely, the worst Civil War poem of the last century was perpetrated by Allen Tate another Fugitive. His poem "Ode to the Confederate Dead" is something of a crime; a criminal cruelty dumped upon an entire country by an otherwise credible poet. Tate's poem has long been considered a classic, a suitable tribute to the Confederate dead - the truth is that both assertions are false.

Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead" is a brilliant poem conceived by another writer associated with the Fugitives (Lowell studied under John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College). These three poems represent the finest and the worst 20th century poetic treatments of the Civil War. So, it is somewhat ironic that one of the finest poets of WW2 should also be a student of Ransom, and a colleague of Robert Lowell at Kenyon - another Fugitive associate and Nashvillian. Let's now complete the Nashville connection...

Perhaps the greatest American poet of WW2 is Randall Jarrell. This poet who would write of bombing raids and dying ball-turret gunners, who would bring the reality of the war into his poetry so powerfully, so lyrically, and so successfully - was born in Nashville and would later teach at Vanderbilt, the very home of the Fugitives.

Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) could embed the nitty gritty of war into his work - the machinery, the oil, the gunmetal, the equipment of death and destruction. He would populate his poems with people who de-populated cities- the air crews of the Eighth Air Force, for example. Jarrell brought the casualties, the blood, the losses, the mechanics of war together in such a way as to bring the war home to the reader - Jarrell's poems make World War Two real; every casualty is strongly felt.

As with most survivors of war, Jarrell was deeply affected if not scarred by his war experiences. Jarrell served in the Army Air Corps (precursor to the US Air Force) working in a control tower. He had enlisted to fly but failed to qualify. Jarrell went on to a very successful academic and writing career after the war becoming a noted critic and poet. He died in 1965 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in a traffic accident. It is not known if Jarrell's death was a suicide or an accident, but his bouts with depression and the intense emotional depth of his poetry give one pause. Robert Lowell referred to his old Kenyon colleague as one of the "best lyric poets of the past".

Jarrell's war poems are jarring, and very real. He brings the experience home and slams it down on the page so that the reader must deal with it, somehow. As with so many of Jarrell's WW2 poems reading "Little Friend, Little Friend" is an emotional experience, a jarring slap on the side of the head with the truth and ugly reality of war. The ugliness and horror of war can be shared via the beauty of poetry, with the obvious irony there for all to see.

One of Jarrell's greatest poems is but a fragment and challenges the definition of poetry itself. It is very short, and very powerful. It seems to embrace the men and machines of the war, and put them back in the air where Jarrell always knew them to be - doing their terrible damage and raining death down upon the cities and one another.

David Perkins wrote, "They are vivid and moving incidents of combat, told with an exceptionally sensitive psychological insight and moral perplexity." (A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After (Cambridge, MA, 1987), 393.) Jarrell tells his stories in beautiful language with little fanfare, and intense emotional power. His poems are novels on a page, huge stories of massive events and shattered people and cities all scrunched up on the page like a crashed bomber - and rebuilt in poetry by way of explanation.

"Little Friend, Little Friend" is a radio transmission/poem between a bomber pilot and a fighter pilot flying in hostile skies. They are there for each other to a certain extent, always just out of range. They do what they can for each other. And in these few lines is a very powerful, very simplified view of the camaraderie, ugliness, bravery, and extremes of fighting wars in the air. Jarrell is one of America's most brilliant poets.

"Little Friend, Little Friend"
by Randall Jarrell, 1945

. . . . Then I heard the bomber call me in:

"Little Friend, Little Friend, I got two
engines on fire. Can you see me, Little
Friend?"

I said "I'm crossing right over you.
Let's go home."

My favorite America poet of the 20th century
Randall Jarrell was the very image of the academic poet. He wore beautiful tweeds. His beard was just-so. He drove a sports car. He was ferociously well-educated. (His wife teasingly called him "arrogant and pretentious." His response: "Wittier than anybody!") His classes were legendary. And he had a tragic death: hit by a car as he walked along a highway at dusk.

And, of course, he was accomplished. In addition to his poems, Jarrell was an acute critic --- those essays are collected in No Other Book --- who could build a case for a writer he loved or destroy an enemy with a line: Oscar Williams's poems, he said, give the impression of "having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter." He wrote a novel satirizing a college literature department. He loved fairy tales, and produced a brilliant translation of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

The poems? You've read him. You just forgot. Jarrell served in World War II. This is his classic poem, anthologized everywhere --- "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," in its entirety:

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

I love Jarrell for his later work, especially the poems from the collection, "The Lost World." He has a leering sense of sex, a warmly ironic take on the dance between men and women, and although he certainly understood men, his sympathies seemed to lay with the despair and hopefulness of women. Which is all to say: Despite what he knew, he was a total romantic. "A wish, come true, is life. I have my life," he wrote. Knowing what we do about his second marriage, we know that this satisfaction is not invented.

Some favorite lines:

While you are, how am I alone?...
Be, as you have been, my happiness;
Let me sleep beside you, each night, like a spoon;
When, starting from my sleep, I groan to you,
May your "I love you" send me back to sleep.
At morning bring me, grayer for its mirroring,
The heavens' sun perfected in your eyes.

A clever reader will plow through this book, pencil in hand, the better to mark lines to steal. Jarrell is that good. And that contemporary --- you won't have to stretch to make his poetry your own. Go ahead. No one will know. And I will never tell.

An interesting poet
I picked up this collection in order to read Jarrell's fairy tale poems that are included, particularly in "Once Upon a Time." However, with such a large example of his work before me, I found myself reading more and finding bits and pieces which spoke to me. I recommend this collection for learning more about Randall Jarrell and his body of work.