"Levels and Opposites" in Randall Jarrell's The Bat-Poet

Two poetries are now competing, a cooked and a raw. The cooked, marvelously expert, often seems laboriously concocted to be tasted and digested by a graduate seminar. The raw, huge, blood-dripping gobbets of unseasoned experiences dished up for midnight listeners.... I exaggerate, of course.

—Robert Lowell, 1960 National Book Award Acceptance Speech

The late 1950s and early 1960s were marked by a profound schism in the world of adult poetry. During this time, Randall Jarrell was one of the preeminent critics of American poetry and was certainly well established as a poet. He attended closely to the contemporary scene and in no small part helped write the canon of American poetry.¹ While several adult poets were beginning to write for children in this period—notably John Ciardi, whose first book for children, The Reason for the Pelican, was published in 1959—Jarrell's forays into children's poetry are considerably different from most.² Whereas Ciardi, Theodore Roethke, and, later, X.J. Kennedy primarily use their children's books as venues for intensified language play, Jarrell uses his children's books—specifically The Bat-Poet (1964)—to work through his theoretical notions of poetry, exploring the postmodern tendencies of contradiction and opposition that are apparent also in his adult work. In The Bat-Poet, Jarrell's poetic investigations specifically center on navigating the schism evident in the so-called anthology wars, the opening skirmish of which was the publication of Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson's anthology The New Poets of England and America (1957).

The poets included in this anthology, as Harvey Shapiro notes in a 1960 review, represent a sampling of those "working in the kitchens of the 'cooked' school" (6). This anthology, largely conservative poetically, was answered three years later with the publication of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry (1960), representing the "raw" school—a group of poets who, in the words of Kenneth Koch, proclaimed, "GOODBYE, castrati of poetry! farewell stale pale skunky pentameters (the only honest English meter, gloop gloop!)" (Allen 236). On March 23, 1960, during his National Book Award acceptance speech, Jarrell's good friend Robert Lowell, who appears in Hall's anthology, delineated these two competing types of poetry: "a poetry of pedantry and a poetry of scandal" (qtd. in Mariani 282). Borrowing his terminology from Claude Lévi-Strauss' The Raw and the Cooked, Lowell quipped that the cooked poetry was "expert and remote," resembling a metaphoric "mechanical or catnip mouse for graduate seminars." The raw poetry, on the other hand, "jerry-built and forensically deadly," was "often like an unscored libretto by some bearded but vegetarian Castro" (qtd. in Mariani 282). Bitterly sarcastic about the cooked school, Koch characterizes the "young poets" of the school in his poem "Fresh Air," calling them "worms" who "trembl[e] in their universities,...bathing the library steps with their spit... / / wish[ing] to perfect their form" (Allen 230). This poetic war heralded a spectacular shift in North American poetry. It would be an oversimplification to say that these anthologies and the two major camps they represented polarized North American poets. Nevertheless, many poets and schools of poets began to be assigned allegiances based on the poetics implied in the Hall, Pack, and Simpson anthology, and explicitly—if briefly—stated in the final section of the Allen anthology. Even today, so-called Language and post-Language poets trace their lineage to the New American school, just as the New Formalists look to the Hall, Pack, and Simpson anthology for their forebears.³

Born May 6, 1914, in Nashville, Tennessee, Jarrell was three years too old to appear in Hall's anthology, for the 28-year-old Hall included only writers "who [were] under forty" (9). It is more likely that Jarrell would have appeared in Hall's anthology than in Allen's, since, despite his affinity for the work of William Carlos Williams, Jarrell had little affinity for the work of the Beats, Projectivists, Black Mountain, and New York School poets who were featured in New American Poetry. However, as I will argue, his...