MICHAEL HINDS
the idea of selected poems alarms me; I cannot rid myself of attaching to that enterprise a valedictory taint.1
Louise Glück Writing in 1955 to his publishers Philip Vaudrin and Harry Ford about his forthcoming Selected Poems, Randall Jarrell made some specific requests relating to its design:
I’d like a title page as much as possible like the early 18th century tombstones Gottfried saw at Stanhope – really they are the Moravian ones I saw at Winston-Salem near here.2
The Gottfried referred to here is Gottfried von Rosenbaum, the gorgeously avuncular composer who had enlivened much of Jarrell’s novel Pictures from an Institution, published in 1954. The success of that novel must have been a source of great satisfaction to Jarrell, particularly as it was well-received and had managed to reach the broader non-specialist audience that he had often complained did not exist for poetry (and particularly his poetry). The book of essays in which Jarrell had made that point most forcibly, Poetry and the Age, had been published the year before Pictures.
So in achieving success with his fiction, by 1955 Jarrell had made his reputation as a notable writer and confirmed his standing as an astute critic whose pessimism about the state of literary culture was unerring. As a poet, however, he remained peripheral.
Jarrell would write later, “the poet’s public’s gone”, and by temporarily becoming a successful novelist he was the living proof of it.3Another letter from 1955 (to Louis Untermeyer) indicates Jarrell’s awareness of this predicament, and how the success of Pictures had made it even more manifest:
It’s very interesting being a prose-book-writer, after having been a poetry-book-writer for so long; it’s like wearing a Visible Cloak. What I’m working on now is a Selected Poems, so soon I’ll be as invisible as ever.4
1. Louise Glück, The First Five Books of Poems, Manchester, 1997, xiii.
2. Randall Jarrell’s Letters: An Autobiographical and Literary Selection, ed. Mary Jarrell, London, 1986, 401-2. Subsequent references to this edition will use the simplified term Letters.
3. “Poets, Critics, and Readers”, The American Scholar, Summer 1959, in Kipling, Auden & Co.:
Essays and Reviews 1935-1964, New York, 1980, 308.
4. Letters, 396.
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For all the pleasure evident at the success of Pictures, Jarrell’s fatalism and morbidity in both of the above-mentioned letters is hard to miss. It is more glaringly obvious in his response to Harry Ford upon the receipt of the final designs for Selected Poems:
“The dustjacket’s too good for a dustjacket and ought to be on my tomb.”5
Confirming Christopher Ricks’s reference to Jarrell as “by way of being a lover of the grave, with all the equivocation of the English ‘of’”, his reiteration of funerary language in association with his Selected Poems is extraordinary and intriguing, not to mention excessive.6 In this essay I shall explore the poetic, cultural, and autobiographical implications of Jarrell’s framing of his Selected Poems in a context of morbidity. In the sense that any selection is also a culling, I will also investigate how Jarrell’s undertaking of his Selected Poems led to decisions about arrangement and selection that reveal an apocalyptic anxiety about the present and future of the American poetry book.
II
That Jarrell at this time had been obsessed with the books of dead men and women, and the legacy that they create, is thoroughly apparent from the essays of Poetry and the Age, and even more pointedly from his omnibus review for Harper’s in October 1955 of Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems, Thomas H. Johnson’s groundbreaking edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson and Poems by Elizabeth Bishop. This conjunction of editions, added to the centennial of Leaves of Grass, make 1955 the golden year of American canonicity, and Jarrell was its chronicler.7His comments on each of the books are essentially testimonial, and are confident about the canonical endurance of Stevens, Bishop, and Dickinson. Vitally, however, Jarrell is not just responding to the merits of their individual poems; rather, he is reflecting on how the collation of their poems within their particular book-formats had proved their work to be signally metonymic, each poem being representative of the book and in turn being representative of the poet and then the nation. For example, Jarrell identifies Bishop’s collection as having the radical canonical power of ensuring the literate future of the U.S. against the Fahrenheit 451º of television:
Sometimes when I can’t go to sleep at night I see the family of the future.
Dressed in three-tone shorts-and-shirt sets of disposable Papersilk, they sit before the television wall of their apartment, only their eyes moving. After I’ve looked a while I always see – otherwise I’d die – a pigheaded soul over in the corner with a book; only his eyes are moving, but in them there is a different look.
Usually it’s Homer he’s holding – this week it’s Elizabeth Bishop. Her Poems seems to me one of the best books an American poet has ever written:
the people of the future (the ones in the corner) will read her just as they will
5. Letter to Harry Ford, 1955, quoted by Stuart Wright in his Randall Jarrell: A Descriptive Bibliography. 1929–1983, Charlottesville, VA, 1986, 60. Wright provides an indispensable guide to Jarrell’s textual history. It is worthwhile noting that even the dust jacket in question billed its author as
“RANDALL|JARRELL|AUTHOR OF PICTURES FROM AN INSTITUTION AND POETRY AND THE AGE”.
6. Christopher Ricks, Beckett’s Dying Words: The Clarendon Lectures 1990, Oxford, 1993, 11.
7. “The Year in Poetry”, reprinted in Kipling, Auden & Co., 242-47.
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read Dickinson or Whitman or Stevens, or the other classical American poets still alive among us.8
Within this context of 1955’s unprecedented boom in production of outstanding and extraordinary American poetry books, Jarrell’s Selected Poems had to find its place.
His reputation was on the line, and by his insistence on the graphics of the cemetery, it was clear that he was thinking of his book in epitaphic terms. Just to confirm this, the protagonist of the last poem of Selected Poems, “Terms”, declares “I am a grave dreaming / That it is a living man”, and, in his final utterance, “‘I am a man’” (211), deliberately echoing Mark Antony’s epitaph for Brutus in Julius Caesar.9 Before dismissing this too readily as adolescent self-pitying or self-dramatizing pessimism, it is worth conjecturing that Jarrell may well have been contemplating a farewell to poetry with this book (if not a farewell to life). Selected Poems was Jarrell’s last publication of poetry of any sort for five years, and its terminal framing may suggest that Jarrell was assuming that he would never write a substantial amount of poetry again; more acutely, he may have felt that he would never be read as a poet again. The essays and letters of the early 1950s reiterate continually his anxiety about his lack of an audience and his consequent lack of inspiration: “I don’t see too many readers, and tend to think of the Reader as an abstraction with a discouragingly blank face – the real ones make me want to write more poems.”10But “real ones” were increasingly hard to find.
Where there is talk of editions and deathbeds, the spectre of Whitman has to be near, and it is worthwhile examining how Jarrell’s Selected reflects his awareness of the greatest Selected Poems of them all, Leaves of Grass. Whitman certainly appears to have influenced Jarrell’s organization of his volume. Whereas with the publication of Losses in 1947, Jarrell commented that he “was sure that the book shouldn’t be split into war and non-war sections, since the effect would be much more monotonous”, in 1955 he adopted that very same policy of division, and Part II of the Selected Poems is mapped out as a twentieth-century Drum-Taps, exclusively devoted to his poetry of World War II.11
In the division of his work into war poetry and other work (“peace” poetry?), Jarrell was superficially indicating the split within his own consciousness that the war had manifested, and showing awareness of how wartime and peacetime demanded different performances and presentations of persona from him as a poet; yet on closer examination it becomes clear that this is what precisely does not happen. The isolated speakers, the straggling women and children, the nervous jouissance and formal unpredictability, all of these Jarrellisms and more remain intact in the “transition”
from Part I of Selected Poems to Part II. If anything, the division of the book exists to make a unifying point about the hegemonic American reality of wartime. The
“monotonous” division of work that Jarrell resisted in Losses became the calculated effect of Selected Poems, and the monotony of warfare (whether physical,
8. Ibid., 244-45.
9. All page references for Jarrell’s poems refer to The Complete Poems, New York, 1969, which includes the Selected of 1955 in its entirety. The arrangements of the Selected are not unfamiliar, therefore, although little attention has been given to the Selected as a meaningful book-event in its own right.
10. Letter to Harry Ford, in Letters, 302.
11. Letter to Robert Giroux, quoted in Wright, Randall Jarrell: A Descriptive Bibliography, 17.
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psychological or cultural) threatens continually to overwhelm the book, its poems, and their protagonists.
William Pritchard has written that the division of Selected Poems, and particularly the sub-division of the war poems, is of negligible interest: “These categories overlap and need not be regarded with any great seriousness.”12This reading allows us to forget about the questions posed by Jarrell’s framing, and allows for a generalized approach to the war poems as war poetry, yet it misses how Jarrell used division to show the complex of discrete experiences and identities that are ordinarily subsumed by the grand narrative of war. At the risk of sacrificing “great seriousness”, it is vital to acknowledge the care with which Jarrell designed this Selected Poems, therefore, and to register that each gesture of selection may be read as having an encrypted as well as an overt effect.
The impression that Jarrell may be presenting a definitive ending with “Terms”
suggests that Selected Poems is a premeditatedly linear narrative, although an end (even in combination with a beginning) does not guarantee the thorough continuousness that would constitute such a narrative. Of course, poetic sequences are not necessarily narratives, but Jarrell’s Selected Poems is neither a sequence nor a narrative. On occasion, it threatens to follow either path, only to come up against a dead end. But there can be more than one dead end, and that is the precarious principle of continuity behind Jarrell’s book.
Volumes of Selected Poems are particularly prone to being read as necessary evils, products of the demands of the classroom and the expediencies of publishing.
Conventionally, the Selected volume is seen as an extension of the work available in the anthologies, an adequate survey (only sometimes chronological) of either a poet’s work or most representative work. Pritchard’s selection of Jarrell’s poems, published in 1990, is a fine example of this type.13Jarrell’s Selected Poems is different in that it presents the work in such a way as to obscure more obvious principles of selection (such as “first”, “best”, or “last”) and instead proposes a tropical organization in which poems are clustered into constellations that are variously titled thematically (“The World Is Everything That Is The Case”) or descriptively (“Soldiers”). Indeed, it is worth remarking how the titles tend to suggest a further division of the volume; Part I of Selected Poems features sections that are titled provocatively and actively –
“Lives”, “Dream-Work”, “The Wide Prospect”, “Once Upon A Time”, “The World Is Everything That Is The Case”, “The Graves In The Forest” – whereas Part II features what Pritchard calls “categories” and Jarrell may have termed “terms”: “Bombers”,
“The Carriers”, “Prisoners”, “Camps And Fields”, “The Trades”, “Children And Civilians”, “Soldiers”. A further implication is that Part I features actors, and Part Two either passengers or victims.
The sub-divisions are of particular interest, indicating that Jarrell was interested in devices of organization beyond the simply thematic. Beyond the apparent separation of war and peace poetry, Jarrell constellated his poems in such a way that his work appears to manifest an inexhaustible variability of texture, self-projection and formal resolution. As for the supposedly vexed question of intentionality, Jarrell’s deliberate mappings of poems suggest a master-strategy, but the actual process of reacting to those mappings reveals other arrangements and flows that contradict such a grand narrative. My contention is that Jarrell’s Selected Poems manifests different sets of
12. William H. Pritchard, Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life, New York, 1990, 117.
13. Selected Poems, ed. William H. Pritchard, New York, 1990.
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intentions in conflict with one another. There may be a narrative super-structure gesturing at the definition and description of a particular subject (Randall Jarrell, war veteran, poet and human), a sequence of poems that allows a satisfactory culmination with the epitaph from “Terms”, but there is also a network of poetic intensities that make “Randall Jarrell” impossible to define, as “a man” or otherwise.
III
“Lives” is the most diffuse of all of the sections in Selected Poems, and rather than being readable as a conventionally continuous sequence, it is a selection within a selection in which the main tropes, themes and characterizations of the entire volume (and implicitly, Jarrell’s poetic canon) are represented metonymically, just as they are (albeit more subtly) in the individual context of the book’s opening poem, “A Girl in a Library”. The girl in the library is the reader who is there and not there; writing the poem presumes her existence, but she is not reading the poem. Instead, she is at an educational remove from the poet, whose summoning of all of the shades of Western literary culture from Oedipus Rex to Eugene Onegin cannot command her attention.
This selection of texts is significant in itself, in that if Oedipus Rex represents the inception of Western culture, then Eugene Onegin’s multi-generic ingenuity (combining the historical epic, the sonnet-sequence, the epic poem, the epistolary novel and Romance) indicates the exhaustion and fulfillment of that culture’s potentialities. Onegin is the ultimate text for the connoisseur, therefore, but it was also popular in its own moment, and is therefore indicative of a golden age of complacency between classical and popular culture. The conditions for making or comprehending such a populist Gesamkunstwerk no longer exist, however, and attempts by Jarrell to produce such a synthesis of art, opera, libretto and music in poems such as “The Face” only culminate in the grave. Jarrell is not setting himself up as the redeemer of this predicament of impasse between reader and poet, rather he is indicating how the failure belongs to both poet and reader, and in fact to everybody.
Pushkin’s Tatyana provokes Jarrell into reflecting upon his own failure to translate the acronyms of his culture – “Phys. Ed.”, “Home Ec.” – into verse: “[Tanya, they won’t even scan]” (17).
“A Girl in a Library” situates culture in an institution and its crisis in curriculum, having to culminate in the use of sardonic pastoral as a self-conscious device of affirming transcendent values (“The Corn King beckoning to his Spring Queen”). The succeeding poem “A Country Life” begins in naturalism and concludes elegiacally, invoking a domestic ancestor in Frost, just as “A Girl in a Library” summoned the Russians, Chekhov and Pushkin. The self-conscious literacy of the library has been replaced here with a self-reflexive tract of Frost country, which Jarrell the critic had pioneered in discovering as an intellectually interrogative space rather than a limited system of rural signifiers. The poem begins with a Frostian statement of characteristically disingenuous ignorance that expresses only a cagy reticence as it pretends to honest candour:
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. (19)
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Similarly, as the poem progresses, its rendering of an apparently harmonious American landscape with its emphasis on the gift outright of its “red clay”, turns out instead to be an evocation of something more like Fitzgerald’s “valley of ashes”, and the terrain is seen as radically alien to human presence, with references to “The bowed and weathered heads above the denim / Or the once-too-often-washed wash dresses?” that clearly evoke the milieu of Walker Evans and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men or Steinbeck’s betrayed pastoral. Dissolving into a monotony of intertextuality (as Jarrell writes in another poem of landscape, “The Orient Express”, in the section entitled “The Wide Prospect”: “there is something, the same thing / Behind everything .... there is always / The unknown unwanted life”[66]) the aura of the native, natural scene has gradually been converted into a distillation of the dehumanizing exhaustion of its inhabitants and of urban horrors elsewhere:
From the tar of the blazing square The eyes shift, in their taciturn
And unavowing, unavailing sorrow. (20)
Jarrell’s landscapes recurrently announce a panoramic aspect that alludes to an enlightened sense of American possibility (“The Wide Prospect”), but in practice they describe the horizontality of a hopeless realism which has obliterated the possibility of the vertical hold of meta-narrative or immortality. In Jarrell’s writing after World War II, he expresses a continuing pessimism about aesthetic possibility that bears a close resemblance to the post-war writing of Adorno (whose thought Jarrell would have been aware of through Hannah Arendt). In Minima Moralia, written in California where Jarrell claimed to have learned to speak, Adorno observed under the heading of the “Beauty of the American landscape” that “even the smallest of its segments is inscribed, as its expression, with the immensity of the whole country” and that its terror lay in how it was “expressionless .... the vanishing landscape leaves no more traces behind than it bears upon itself”.14Combining these observations, Adorno is describing a metonymic expressionlessness that Jarrell manifests throughout the paysages of Selected Poems. Jarrell also conveys a powerful sense that the “neutral”
and isolationist eye of the native scene cannot altogether obliterate the turbulence of landscapes and battle-scenes elsewhere. “A Country Life” directs the reader radically to the poems of Part Two, where the paradoxical horizontality of landscape from the air is a fantasy concealing the victims of aerial warfare on the ground. In “Losses” in Part II, Jarrell describes the state’s double-exploitation of its airmen; encouraged to view Europe as two-dimensional landscape – “They said, ‘Here are the maps’; we burned the cities” (146) – they are turned into killers without a sense of consequence, but also the dream of enlightenment that underpinned their education has been exploded (“we burned / The cities we had learned about in school” [145]). The lost
14. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, translated by E.F.N. Jephcott, London, 1974, 48-49. Jarrell’s remark about learning to speak in California is reported by Pritchard in Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life, 11: “In the fifty-one years of his life, he lived for extended periods in Ohio, Texas, Illinois, Arizona, New York, North Carolina, New Jersey, and the District of Columbia, in addition to Tennessee and California, while spending briefer periods at work or on holiday in
14. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, translated by E.F.N. Jephcott, London, 1974, 48-49. Jarrell’s remark about learning to speak in California is reported by Pritchard in Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life, 11: “In the fifty-one years of his life, he lived for extended periods in Ohio, Texas, Illinois, Arizona, New York, North Carolina, New Jersey, and the District of Columbia, in addition to Tennessee and California, while spending briefer periods at work or on holiday in