Randall Jarrell—Only a Reader

It's a good idea, when reading Randall Jarrell's criticism, to find a quiet empty room. If someone else must be present, make it a loving patient companion who won't mind being interrupted every five minutes when you read aloud sentences like these: "The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks." "If Miss Glasgow were aroused in the middle of the night by a burglar, who clapped a pistol to her head and demanded, 'Name me a philosopher!' you can be certain it would not be Hume." "These seem easily different from anybody else's poems, but hardly distinguishable from one another; their language, tone, and mechanism of effect have a relishingly idiosyncratic and monotonous regularity, as if they were the diary some impressionable but unimpassioned monomaniac had year by year been engraving on the side of a knitting-needle."

Reviewing a selection of Jarrell's essays for the New Yorker in 1999, Adam Gopnik writes that "Jarrell's real subject . . . was the American idiom, and it's the tone he refined from that idiom which will inspire you after his subjects are forgotten." This forgetting, however, is the problem with reading Randall Jarrell. We delight in his wit and his original voice, which continue to set a lofty bar for reviewers; but who remembers or has even heard of the luckless poets he so brilliantly skewers? The style somersaults and soars above a world of letters that has long since disappeared.

A similar datedness pervades Jarrell's social criticism. He can sound startlingly prescient, as in A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1962): "Most of the information people have in common is something that four or five years from now they will not even remember having known." But we have our own critics of an information age that has exploded beyond anything Jarrell imagined, just as we have more recent critics of American waste and consumerism in writers such as Wendell Berry and Christopher Lasch. For all his impassioned energy—he was usually right—Jarrell's essays on anti-intellectualism, schools, and mass media speak to a blither, cockier America of the 1950s and early 60s.

Jarrell excels, his contemporaries agree, when—forsaking one-liners and cultural generalizations—he devotes himself to praise. His appreciations of Frost, Auden, Stevens, and Bishop might seem conventional today, but that's because we live in a critical climate that Jarrell helped inform. "Perhaps," writes an admiring rueful Brad Leithauser, "he suffers from having been so often right." When Jarrell extols less widely acclaimed authors like Christina Stead and Rudyard Kipling, his enthusiasm is no less infectious. Countless readers have tracked down Stead's The Man Who Loved Children, prompted solely by Jarrell's leisurely, meditative, and widely reprinted preface.

Writing "Some Lines from Whitman" in Poetry and the Age (1953), his most influential collection, Jarrell says, "To show Whitman for what he is one does not need to praise or explain or argue, one needs simply to quote." And so he does, for pages on end, choosing essential passages we all remember and out-of-the-way ones we've probably forgotten, pausing only to remind us, with some inspired vignette, that we're reading Randall Jarrell: "They might have put on his tombstone Walt Whitman: He Had His Nerve." After one long quotation he exclaims that "these lines are so good that even admiration feels like insolence, and one is ashamed of anything that one can find to say about them. How anyone can dismiss or accept patronizingly the man who wrote them, I do not understand." It's important to recall that many of Jarrell's contemporary readers did dismiss Whitman, or accept him patronizingly, which is why "Some Lines from Whitman" became a famous essay. But today's readers, used to a more methodical, often combative critical writing, might resent Jarrell's breezy assumptions and indignant protests, preferring to have the bard's virtues spelled out and anatomized. Even Leithauser calls Jarrell's "vice" of spurning explanation "simultaneously vexing and endearing."

If Jarrell, intending to praise, sometimes left...