Randall Jarrell and His Age

Several readers have found the poem representative.¹ Like many of Jarrell’s protagonists—among them the “Woman at the Washington Zoo” in her “dull, null” uniform, the depressed child of “The Elementary Scene,” and the dead American airmen of “Losses”—the woman in “Next Day” seems confined by circumstance and fate to a deeply troubling typicality. This is the plot many of Jarrell’s poems suggest, the story his characters suffer: no one else confirms their unique selfhood, and so they are given occasions to doubt it.

Everyone who reads “Next Day” acquires some idea of the sort of person who speaks and how she feels. It takes longer to see how Jarrell’s stanzas contribute to our sense of her frustrations—to see in the poem Jarrell’s verse style. Jarrell rhymes “exceptional” with “exceptional,” the word with a later instance of itself; the buildup of other repeated words (“wisdom,” “wish,” “afraid,” “body”) suggests the woman’s doubts that such words, for her, retain useful meanings. The rhyming of stressed with unstressed syllables helps produce the self-muffling, self-baffling tone she adopts. And the spaces and pauses the stanza form leaves (as if for replies) help make the poem as affecting as it is.²

Jarrell’s stylistic particularities have been hard for critics to hear and describe, both because the poems call readers’ attention instead to their characters and because Jarrell’s particular powers emerge so often from mimesis of speech.³ Jarrell’s style responds to the alienations it delineates by incorporating or troping speech and conversation, linking emotional events within one person’s psyche to speech acts that might take place between persons. This chapter will emphasize those interpersonal elements, which, taken together, create Jarrell’s style. I begin by describing an early poem in which Jarrell seems to discover the interpersonal as a goal for his poems. I then show how that goal emerged from Jarrell’s readings of modernism, of literary history, and of Wordsworth. These readings, in turn, let us see how his verse style works and what its elements achieve.

Randall Jarrell began to create his style in poems he finished between 1939 and 1942; the best-known among them is “90 North.”⁴ It is a poem of announcement, discovery, and self-dedication, analogous to other self-dedicatory poems (Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” Heaney’s “Digging”) in which an extraliterary discovery stands for a poet’s commitment to his work. The dreamer-explorer says he has reached a goal: “I sailed all night—till at last … I stood at the northern pole” (CP 113). Yet the dream quest, remembered from childhood, seems futile to the adult dreamer who completes it:

The isolated, adult, his explorations “meaningless,” seems to have discovered (to borrow Geoffrey Hartman’s words about Wordsworth) “that to heighten consciousness [is] to intensify rather than assuage the sense of isolation” (Wordsworth’s xvii). Like Wordsworth at Simplon Pass (Prelude [1805] 6: 580–585), Jarrell’s dreamer expected sublimity, and wisdom, from a summit, but learns instead that he must go back down:

Jarrell’s best critics have often overstated the poems’ senses of futility by ignoring the ways in which his style contains and answers them.⁵ Jerome Mazzaro has called Jarrell’s corpus of poetry “a succession of efforts … to get rid of the ‘aloneness’ which he felt” (CE 99). These efforts generate the fictions of speaking and listening with which he created his style. Even as it describes isolation, “90 North” thus imagines a listener. The poem flaunts devices that imply speech and response—deictics (“There,” “Here”), rhetorical questions (“Were they really my end?”; “Now what? Why …”), self-corrections (“The world—my world”), and repetitions. These evocations of listeners became essential components of Jarrell’s practice.

Jarrell developed that practice by attending at once to his own emotions and to literary history. “90 North” sets limits to unaided imagination. But its discovered terminus, where “all lines, and winds / End,” also tropes a more specific limit—the end, not of wishes or poetry but of modernist poetry, what Jarrell in 1942 dubbed “The End of the Line.” “Modernist poetry,” he wrote, “appears to be and is generally considered to be a violent break with romanticism; it is actually … an end product in which most of the tendencies of romanticism have been carried to their limits” (KA 77). “Poets can go back and repeat the ride,” Jarrell continued, or “settle … along the railroad”; nevertheless “Modernism As We Knew It … is dead” (KA 81). William Pritchard writes that “‘90 North’ is exactly the poem to illustrate the ‘fairly solitary individuality’ [Jarrell] predicted for the poet of the early 1940s, at the end of the line, just where the man in the poem finds himself” (81). But “90 North” reflects the postmodernist poet’s dilemma in more specific ways. The polar explorer who turns back to the real world points the way, not only for modern poetry to rejoin other poetry but also for modern poetry to face, and hence to rejoin, other people, whose speech can be heard and shared.⁶

Modernism can be distinguished from romanticism, in Jarrell’s view, by its greater “specialization”: the modernist poet is much less like nonpoets, modernist poetic language much farther from nonexpert speech and prose, than Romantics and their language were.⁷ The early poem “Esthetic Theories: Art as Expression” mocks poems, like medical specimens, “preserved in jars, and certified / By experts” (CP 384). Jarrell wrote in 1950 that he intended his poems “for the audience that reads poetry from age to age, I believe, and not for the more specialized audience that reads modern poetry” (KA 170). Reviewing Poetry and the Age, Delmore Schwartz found that its essays “express the anguish of one who does not feel superior, but lonely; and the dismay of one who does not want to be cut off from other human beings by his love of literature” (CE 43). Against the “expert” or “specialist” models he deplored (models that chapter 2 will revisit), Jarrell’s work attempts to reduce the distance between poets and the rest of the world.

The explicitly political poems of the thirties and forties sometimes see politics in the same terms in which other poems and letters see literary history and private life. How can Jarrell bring himself closer to the subjects and victims of politics? An unpublished poem, “The Patient Leading the Patient,” asks what Jarrell can do for “The poor with their bad manners and bad bones … whom I do nothing for / Unless pity is something; and it is something, / Isn’t it?” (Berg Collection). Alluding to Christ’s “The poor ye have always with ye” (Matthew 26:11), “The Soldier Walks Under the Trees of the University” attacks the gaps in understanding between academia and the war effort, academia and the American poor, academia, and everything “real”:

Modernist specialization, modernist remove, were hardly Jarrell’s discovery: he inherited (from Edmund Wilson, among others) the idea that poets after Pound and Eliot would have to reconnect themselves to the outside world. Auden’s late-thirties work took on just these problems—one reason Jarrell followed it so intently and with such mixed feelings. By 1941 he had reached a judgment on it he was never to retract: “Auden has been successful,” Jarrell wrote, “in making his poetry more accessible; but the success has been entirely too expensive. Realizing that the best poetry of the twenties was too inaccessible, we can will our poetry into accessibility—but how much poetry will be left when we finish?” (Third 149).

Jarrell shared Auden’s early Marxist sympathies, as his thirties and forties essays attest; he even wrote an admiring poem about Friedrich Engels (Berg Collection).⁸ But the kind of poetry Jarrell developed did not find its answer to modernist isolation by turning (as Wilson recommended in Axel’s Castle, as Auden had in poems such as “Spain”) from the level of the solitary individual to the level of a whole society. Jarrell’s mature poems would describe, and try to alleviate, the isolation of the modern poet, not by addressing a whole society but by recognizing other people one by one—seeking, with and for them, as notes for a 1958 essay put it, a “quiet private place where something can ripen”—whether or not such a place could be had (UNC-Greensboro).

This difference between the level of society (which Jarrell’s lonely characters largely reject) and the level of the interpersonal (which Jarrell and his characters seek) might be understood in terms of the differing goods the philosopher Paul Ricoeur names “equality” and “solicitude.”⁹ For Ricoeur “Equality … is to life in institutions what solicitude is to interpersonal relations. Solicitude provides to the self another who is a face, in [Levinas’s sense]. Equality provides to the self another who is an each” (202; italics Ricoeur’s). The front pages of the Nation pursued “equality”; the poems and book reviews Jarrell published in the back of the same magazine pursued “solicitude” instead. Jarrell’s literary-historical problem about modernism, his ethical problem about solidarity, and his more personal problem about loneliness, thus steered him toward the same goal: he would write poems that describe and alleviate isolation, imagining “other people” and their speech.

Jarrell found models for such poems in Wordsworth. From the early forties to the sixties, his prose constantly invokes Wordsworth as a standard of value and as a counterweight to current practice. “The End of the Line” mentions many poets but quotes only Wordsworth: “the very world, which is the world / Of all of us—the place where, in the end, / We find our happiness or not at all” (KA 81). Jarrell wrote Harry Ford in January 1955: “I’m working hard on Wordsworth right now—I mean to do four or five long articles, designed from the beginning to be a book”; the same year Jarrell “spent a month reading nothing but Wordsworth … and like him much better than ever, even” (Berg Collection; Letters 404).¹⁰ Jarrell told the readers of the New York Times Book Review in 1955 that “when I recommend the second book of The Excursion, or speak of Wordsworth as one of the three or four greatest of English poets, I don’t mind having the remark thought either a truism or an absurdity” (KA 220). Three years later he treated the audience at the National Book Awards to quotations from the preface to Lyrical Ballads, from Book 7 of the Prelude, and from Wordsworth’s sonnet to Toussaint L’Ouverture (“About Popular Culture” 9–10).

It took originality for a reader trained on New Critical practices to see Wordsworth as a usable model.¹¹ Robert Penn Warren wrote in American Review in 1934, “I had rather read [Archibald] MacLeish’s Poems, 1924–1933 than Wordsworth’s Prelude; and I am prepared to accept whatever damnation that involves” (“Twelve Poets” 218). (The same issue contained Jarrell’s first published poems.) Warren (and Brooks and Ransom and Tate) are the critics Jarrell described in 1941, who “have repudiated romanticism so wholeheartedly that they condemn in their criticism the vices that they exploit in their poetry” (KA 62). Jarrell’s 1941 letter to Louise Bogan declares by contrast his own allegiances: “I was simply charmed by something you said (in Partisan Review I think) about the feel of early romanticism at its best; I feel so, too” (Letters 45).

What did Jarrell learn from Wordsworth? Occasionally his poems echo Wordsworth directly.¹² More often he invoked Wordsworth’s example as oblique authorization for his own projects. Jarrell’s poems take seriously Wordsworth’s famous prescription of 1802: “the Poet must descend from [his] supposed height; and, in order to excite rational sympathy, he must express himself as other men express themselves” (261). Jarrell’s “The One Who Was Different” exclaims (in lines Elizabeth Bishop admired), “I feel like the first men who read Wordsworth. / It’s so simple I can’t understand it” (CP 316). “When critics first read Wordsworth’s poetry,” Jarrell reminds us in “The Obscurity of the Poet,” “they felt that it was silly”—though many “said, with Byron,” that it didn’t make sense (Age 8; italics Jarrell’s). The disarming flatness, the patches of very simple (and unironic) diction that have made Jarrell’s critics so uncomfortable—these, too, seem learned from Wordsworth. Reviewing Jarrell’s Selected Poems in 1956, James Dickey imagined a debate between two fictive readers, A and B:

Jarrell took from Wordsworth the idea that poems had to be “convincing as speech” before they were anything else; to be, for him, “convincing as speech,” the poem ordinarily had to imagine a listener. Barbara Schapiro has described Wordsworth’s “continual reference to a personal other … in his most deeply introspective poems”: as William turns to Dorothy in “Tintern Abbey” and to Coleridge throughout the Prelude, Jarrell and his personae also invoke projected listeners (31–32). “The Bad Music” asks: “Of those millions, how many know or love at all / You, Anna?” (CP 368) “The Player Piano”—written over twenty years later—pivots on imperatives, asking its audience twice to “Look” and once to “Listen” (CP 354–355). Both Jarrell and Wordsworth quote other speakers in their poems, and both like to quote children—the children in “The Truth” and “Protocols,” numbed and half conscious of death, look like answers to the child of “We Are Seven,” who knows nothing of it. Both Jarrell and Wordsworth can turn in mid-poem from one auditor to another; both can treat poems as occasions to resituate oneself in time, to contrast a remembered event with a present occasion.

All these poetic tactics cohere as one overarching project, a project inaugurated in “90 North.” David Bromwich has shown how Wordsworthian vocation reappears in Frost and in Stevens stripped of the encounters with other people that Wordsworth requires. What Bromwich finds in Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence” (but not in its modernist rewritings) is a quality he calls “sympathy,” though (he writes), “Sympathy may be a misleading word for what I mean: ‘acknowledgement’ or ‘recognition’ might be better. But [sympathy’s] very etymology includes what is central to my argument: a feeling that touches some second figure, and that could not come into being without it” (Choice 230–231).¹³ Sometimes Jarrell’s second person is an imagined listener or reader. Sometimes it is a character who is lost, or dead, or beyond hearing. And sometimes the second person appears and responds in the scene of the poem, an occurrence that corresponds to a “happy ending.” It is such a turn to the intersubjective—to the quest for “acknowledgement” or “recognition”—that binds Jarrell’s work most deeply to Wordsworth’s poetry.

Jarrell’s Wordsworthian turn towards the interpersonal created his characteristic verse style. Many readers see discontinuities between the war poems and later poems such as “Next Day.” The first often feature an omniscient or impersonal narrator; the second tend to be spoken by characters. These differences make it easy to miss the persistence of Jarrell’s goals: both the war poems and the later poems seek to establish a nexus of recognition between reader and speaker, speaker and listener, actor and observer.

The poet of the war poems seeks or wishes—often fruitlessly, as he realizes—to individualize soldiers and pilots who risk becoming mute, interchangeable objects. The convalescent serviceman in “The Sick Nought” disturbs Jarrell into heights of rhetoric because he seems not even to know his family:

The soldiers and airmen who are granted some measure of consciousness in the war poems seek (and only occasionally find) a particular, dead or departed or vulnerable individual amid the alienations of the war. The lost flier in “A Front” asks, “Can’t you hear me?” before his plane crash-lands (CP 13; italics Jarrell’s). “A Pilot from the Carrier,” falling slowly in his parachute (and perhaps to death by fire) recapitulates the trajectory of the explorer-poet in “90 North”: “He is alone; and hangs in knowledge / Slight, separate, estranged: a lonely eye / Reading a child’s first scrawl” (CP 153). Another poem about a pilot, “The Dead Wingman,” deserves more attention than it has received. Its protagonist circles, in dreams, the space where his wingman died:

Shifts in caesura placement and line length graph the feel of a moving airplane: lines seem to yaw, bank, turn. Jarrell’s speaker seems at once a pilot bereaved of his companion and a poet looking for readers, sadly confined to his unstable aerial view. The horribly distant houses look like paper—it would be better to live in them than to see them from afar. By the same token, it would be better to see the faces as faces than as toys, but Jarrell’s weary pilot can see no one face-to-face: no one answers or looks back.

Jarrell liked to define literature (following Freud’s definition of a dream) as “a wish modified by a truth.”¹⁵ The description gains special force in “The Dead Wingman,” where the poem’s false or avoided endings represent the pilot’s wish (“I have a friend”) and the actual end of the poem the truth (SH 140–141). Key words grow multivalent through repetition: the poem describes a stare in search of a sign that turns out to be a recurring no. The poem begins as a rescue mission, gives us to understand that the mission has failed, and ends as a dream of that mission: when the pilot’s dream ends, the poem does too. The words “sign” and “no” and the rhyme on “stare” all return: nothing will change, no listener, no audience, no friend can ever be found.

Suzanne Ferguson has described “The Dead Wingman” as a poem of unrelieved fatalism: its final “no,” she writes, “expands from the simple negation of the individual’s search for his ‘little friend’ to [a] universal negation” (Poetry 96). Its attitudes become more complex, and more generous, once the pilot’s actions are seen as models for reading and writing. Over the length of the poem the aerial remove of the poet-pilot-dreamer, the distance of the land, the inaccessibility of the missing partner, remain insistently “unaccepted,” a hypothesis persisted in despite contrary evidence. The pilot and his chronicler end the poem without renouncing their desire to close the distance, to find the one person they mean to hear or see—they trace the circles of their ache even in sleep and give up only when exhausted. Jarrell’s poem, circling its no, thus imagines a bereaved pilot to whom Jarrell offers his own poem in partial consolation, even solidarity: “The Dead Wingman” aches and strives, and sounds as if it aches and strives, to be a speech to and for its pilot, to become itself the sign of recognition he can’t see.

Seen this way, the pilot of “The Dead Wingman” can look very much like the woman of “Next Day,” who also mourns her best, or only, “friend.” Both poems seem to allegorize models of poetic reading like Allen Grossman’s, in which poems model intersubjective relations. For Grossman, poems make their readers fictively intimate with persons who (by the end of the poem) have said to us all they can ever say: “the poem,” he writes, “is, therefore, the dead friend” (319).¹⁶ Like “The Dead Wingman,” “Next Day” tries to pick out its nameless speaker and to alleviate her loneliness by individuating her to us, making for her a responsive poem (even a stanza form) of her own. And the graveside scene near the end of “Next Day,” like the pilot’s dream in “The Dead Wingman,” gives us a model of “care” (as Grossman would put it) in that now-solitary speaker’s memory, a model to which she wishes to return. As Jarrell offers his third-person poem to the pilot who mourns “The Dead Wingman,” the woman of poems such as “Next Day” offers her speech to us: in both, a reader may recognize the speaker and thus take the place of the absent friend.

Though many nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets may be said to trope speech, Jarrell’s speechlikeness far exceeds the norms of his era. Jarrell’s meters (as Stephen Spender noticed) tend to evoke, but also to violate, accentual-syllabic pentameter norms in the name of varying kinds of speech.¹⁷ Karl Shapiro had those metrics in mind when he wrote that Jarrell “advanced beyond Frost in using … the actual rhythms of our speech” (RJ 215). Jarrell told Allen Tate that his 1940 poem “The Christmas Roses” “is supposed to be said (like a speech from a play) with expression, emotion and long pauses” (Letters 26).¹⁸ Its speaker’s desperate garrulity belies her loneliness; the terminal patient speaks to her absent friend (or romantic partner), whose absence has made her feel unreal (and made her want to die):

The poem—probably Jarrell’s first with a female speaker—has become a locus for discussion of Jarrell and gender.¹⁹ If “The Christmas Roses” was the first of Jarrell’s poems to link speechlikeness and the feminine, it was also the first one to show how thoroughly speechlikeness could demonstrate loneliness, how much poems that sounded like speech could represent a speaker’s need for response. The end of the poem leaves the hospital settings behind entirely, becoming a protest and plea to the absent beloved: “Touch me and I won’t die, I’ll look at you / And I won’t die, I’ll look at you, I’ll look at you” (CP 393). That closure amounts to a tonal gamble, a bawl: either we react almost as if to a real acquaintance dying or we dismiss her pleas as sentimental, as failures of art.

Jarrell’s craft—so involved in troping speech—required that he risk such sentimentality.²⁰ These risks turn up, often, in his endings, which can rely on tone, inflection, and the force of a speech act almost to the exclusion of images. If the poems begin (like “Next Day”) in concrete situations, they are often situations from which the recognized speakers wish to escape. The poems can thus end on abstract adjectives (“commonplace,” “solitary”), as in “Next Day,” or in bizarre, affecting, abstract illocution, as in “The Venetian Blind,” whose speaker finds that inside or around him “something calls, as it has called, / ‘But where am I? But where am I?” (CP 55). Jarrell’s revealing notes for a talk on his own poems show that he knew the risks his work was taking: “poetry,” the notes assert, is

Early in his career Jarrell began a lengthy essay called “Why Particulars Are So Much More Effective Than Generalities” (Berg Collection). In choosing generalities for his endings so often, Jarrell knew what he was doing. And what he was doing was choosing intonation, persona, pace—all the aspects of poems that make them like speech—over consistent symbols, proportions, and descriptions—the aspects of poems that make them like craft objects.

In many of the war poems the awkwardness of real speech becomes the chief stylistic goal. The child who speaks “The Truth” (Jarrell’s note tells us) “has had his father, his sister and his dog killed in one of the early fire-raids on London” (CP 11):

Comparison of these lines with their source (Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingame’s War and Children) will demonstrate how far they are from mere transcription.²¹ What matters in them is not raw verisimilitude but the sense of speaking and listening—the interpersonal nexus wished or hoped into being—for which realism in speech serves Jarrell as a proxy. In this case that nexus joins the mother and the shell-shocked boy; she returns at the end, when “she put her arms around me and we cried.” As with “The Christmas Roses,” the apparent artlessness of “The Truth,” Jarrell’s elimination from it of most kinds of specifically poetic organization, makes the devices peculiar to his work—the interruptions, the repetitions, the open spaces—clearer.²²

All these devices ask us to imagine a speaker’s vocalized, demonstrated need for others. Charles Taylor writes that “the self’s interpretations [of itself] can never be fully explicit” since those interpretations are “part of, internal to, or constitutive of the ‘object’ studied” (34). If Taylor is right, poetic language should approach inarticulacy as it tries harder to distinguish the self (or the inner self, or interiority) from its social surround. And this is exactly what happens in Jarrell, whose hesitations, evasions, ellipses, and stutters (all present in “The Truth”) enact the difficulty of making one’s own interiority present to others. His rhetorical questions, and the spaces his poems leave for answers, contribute to the same project, since, as Taylor also writes, “One is a self only among other selves. … My self-definition is understood as an answer to the question Who I am. And this question finds its original sense in the interchange of speakers” (35).

Jarrell often incorporates “interchange of speakers” in subgenres of poetry (such as the meditative or scenic lyric) that normally exhibit only one speaker. When he observes people with nothing to say, their silence (as in “The Sick Nought”) becomes the poem’s subject; happier figures in Jarrell’s war poems find themselves amid some sort of verbal interchange. His most accomplished war poem along these lines must be the intricately awkward “Transient Barracks,” which describes a gunnery instructor’s return to America. “Transient Barracks” sets itself to make several overheard speakers, and their overlapping phrases, contribute to the creation of one lyric subject. Here is the first half:

With their quick scene-setting, their self-deprecating narrator and their reliance on the soldiers they quote, the lines mimic the chitchat we might overhear in an actual barracks. They owe much to the war reporter Ernie Pyle, whose columns about ordinary soldiers Jarrell admired unreservedly.²³ For Pyle, he wrote, the speaking soldiers’ “scraps—jobs, families and states … are a bridge pushed back shakily to their real lives; and [Pyle] understands and puts down what they tell him, always; and the foolish think it a silly habit of his” (KA 116).

As in the dispatches, so in the poem, the soldiers and flyers’ lives, their continued being, matter more than any point an observer-author could make about them. It is in this populated, talky, milieu that the shaving soldier knows and claims himself as a speaking subject. The poem began when he looked at his face and can end when (answering somebody else’s question) he realizes that he is “home for good”:

The instructor feels “real” and knows he is “back for good” when he can join in the conversation, answering a direct question: “This is my field.” Repeated words at line endings (field, real), with their chiming long e, frame the key lines, almost all of them reported speech. Jarrell’s ending thus makes a particular structural principle out of what for Grossman is a general rule: Grossman writes, “The achievement of that state of sociability in which interhuman acknowledgement is adequate to human need extinguishes lyric by putting an end to the trouble which gives rise to lyric” (277). This interhuman acknowledgement becomes the effect produced by Jarrell’s closing phrases. The sick woman of “The Christmas Roses” dreamt of being listened to, of being heard: the conversation of the Stateside dayroom confirms the flyer’s new safety, which seems to him a dream come true.

“For the confirmation of my identity,” Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “I depend entirely upon other people; and it is the great saving grace of companionship for solitary men that it makes them ‘whole’ again” (476).²⁴ The shaving man in “Transient Barracks” recognizes himself in the mirror because he is surrounded by companions who can speak to him. More usually, people in Jarrell’s poems, like the patient of “The Christmas Roses,” try but fail to recognize themselves in mirrors, attempt to claim their faces as theirs.²⁵ Mary remembers Randall as playfully obsessed with mirrors: “He had favorite and unfavorite mirrors but I believe he looked into all he ever saw” (Remembering 136). The fourteen-year-old girl in “The Night Before the Night Before Christmas” “looks at herself in the mirror / And thinks; ‘Do I really look like that?’ … ‘What do I really look like? / I don’t know” (CP 42). The woman in “Next Day” is “afraid, this morning, of my face,” which “Repeats to me, ‘You’re old.’” Christopher Benfey has looked at Jarrell’s poems and seen “a man seeing himself as a woman in the mirror”; for him, Jarrell’s “mirror poems … mak[e] male narcissism and male identity relatively self-contained and self-justifying, while condemning women to exhibitionism, dependent on the gaze of others” (123, 128). If to be “feminine” in Jarrell’s time and place meant depending on others to confirm one’s own identity, then almost everyone in Jarrell’s poems seems “feminine”: not only the lonely woman of “Next Day” but also the soldier in “Transient Barracks,” “The Lonely Man” in the poem of the same name, and the bearded Jarrell of “Thinking of the Lost World”:

Jarrell is not really Santa Claus, nor is he the boy he remembers being. But he is glad when the boys call him “Santa Claus”—glad but also disturbed, since (like the boy in “The Truth”) he doesn’t seem to others to be himself. As in “Transient Barracks,” the seed of the “miraculous” lies in others’ speech. Encounters with mirrors, attempts to establish visual identity, end in anxiety; aural interchange has better results. And the poems’ many exclamations and rhetorical questions—exclamations such as “Hi, Santa Claus!” or “The States!”; questions such as “Where’s my own hand?”—thus become the simplest and most consistent of the many devices with which Jarrell imagines speech as interchange, testing or confirming the presence of somebody else.²⁶

Fictions of imagined or real companions, of listeners answering and being answered, console Jarrell and his characters whenever anything can. These fictions of shared space, response, interchange extend outside Jarrell’s own poems into their relations with other texts. When Mark Jarman writes that “Jarrell’s characters seem to speak in quotations,” he means not that they quote one another—though they do—but that they quote or allude to books they have read (573). Thus the squirrels in “The Night Before the Night Before Christmas” “have nothing to lose but their lives” because the girl in the poem has read the Communist Manifesto, and the snow-loaded boughs near the end of the poem seem to read “To End Hopefully / Is a Better Thing—/ A Far, Far Better Thing” because the girl, falling asleep, conflates Sydney Carton’s words with a motto from her father’s office (CP 50). The woman in “Next Day” takes refuge in William James; the hermitlike painter of “The End of the Rainbow,” living alone on a California beach, quotes Goethe and Beddoes to her dog and rehearses, to herself,

These chains of quotations and allusions might remind us of the chains of speakers in poems such as “Transient Barracks”—they trope them, in a sense.²⁷ Quotations connect Jarrell’s stranded characters to a world more populous and more hospitable than one beach cottage or apartment or bedroom. In the logic of Jarrell’s quotations, the more we can use or reuse others’ words, the more we feel our world is theirs too, and the less lonely we become.

Jarrell’s exchanges and quotations interact with his frequent forms of aposiopesis—trailing off, interruption, and self-interruption. All create moments and instances where (as Pritchard puts it) “words fail him, or just about”; these moments “implicitly ask … to be understood by the sympathetic reader as proof of true feeling” (198). These devices, too, evoke the intersubjective—the play between one speaker and the possibility of another. Jarrell’s broken-off lines can imply that a conversation should have taken place but cannot: they indicate—sometimes quite literally—distress calls. The climactic speech act in “A Front,” a flier’s “Over—,” goes unanswered. His controllers “beg, order, are not heard; and hear the darker / Voice rising: Can’t you hear me? Over. Over—/ All the air quivers, and the east sky glows” (CP 173). “A Perfectly Free Association” also ends on a distress call: its air traffic controller

Jarrell closes other poems with similar calls for assistance. More often, though (as in “The Dead Wingman”), he ends poems by following broken-off utterance with a brief closural gesture—mentioning, for instance, sleep or death. Evoking (in Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s term) “nonliterary experiences” of closure, such devices allow the poems to end while leaving their problems of human communication unsolved (121).

If (as Grossman claims) a whole or integral line of poetry represents a whole speaking subject, Jarrell’s interdependent, incomplete speech acts, his broken-up sentences, and his cut-off or wavering pentameter-based lines represent interdependent, relational selves. So often afraid they are “commonplace” and “solitary,” the people in his poems are no more whole nor self-sufficient than their utterances: they say things such as “That I—That I—But anything will do,” or “These are valued at—some value I forget, / Which I learned from—I cannot remember the source” (CP 306). These phrases make no sense, convey no information, until we have learned to hear the characters behind them. The characters, in turn, elicit our sympathy by trying and failing to say things: an unsympathetic character in Jarrell’s novel “seemed very human and attractive” when, for once, “he lost his way in his sentence” (49–50).

The discipline known as sociolinguistics has devoted much attention to forms and devices of conversation, among them interruption, repetition, and incompletion. These devices often signal a change of speaker; they also distinguish conversation from recitation and scripted performance. As the sociolinguist Robin Lakoff explains,

It could also mark his verse as feminine. The same devices that mark speech as conversational, spontaneous, or shared can also mark particular speakers as women. Lakoff lists habits observers take to characterize women’s spoken English as against men’s: most of the features in her list also characterize Jarrell’s poetry as against the work of his peers. One such habit is the use of “adjectives … expressing emotional not intellectual evaluation” (such as lovely)”; another involves “Forms that convey impreciseness: so, such,” “hedges of all kinds” (204). Jarrell’s poetry make copious use of these features: he writes, in one late poem, “It’s so—/ So agreeable,” and in another, “I saw that he resembled—/ That he was—// I didn’t see it” (CP 305, 287). Lakoff also describes “Intonation patterns that resemble questions, indicating uncertainty or need for approval” as stereotypically feminine; Pamela Fishman’s empirical studies have in fact found that “women use tags and declarative questions much more often than men” (204, 254). Jarrell uses these patterns at key points in his poems: “Don’t signs, don’t roads know any more than boys?”; “If things could happen so, and you not know / What you could do, why, what is there you could do?” (CP 132, 262). Other examples of feminine speech patterns include being interrupted (examples of which multiply above) and being indirect.²⁸

All these “linguistic traits,” Lakoff explains, “are directly connected not with their speakers’ actual lack of power, but with their feelings about the possession of power. Women’s language becomes a symbolic expression of distance from power, or lack of interest in power” (207). Jarrell took advantage of these associations, and his contemporaries noticed. Karl Shapiro’s prose poem to Jarrell contrasts his “prose sentences—like Bernini graves, staggeringly expensive, Italianate, warm, sentences once-and-for-all” with “the verses you leave half-finished in mid-air—I once knew a woman who never finished a sentence” (Bourgeois 91). Shapiro seems to have mapped the difference between Jarrell’s prose and verse onto purported masculine and feminine “sides”; later critics divided his work up in similar ways.²⁹

If men tend to interrupt, and women to be interrupted, it is no wonder the poet who wrote of himself, “‘Woman,’ men said of him, and women, ‘Man’” should tend to interrupt himself (CP 471).³⁰ At the same time Jarrell’s linguistic habits—from his subjective adjectives to his abstract endings—emphasize “rapport” (in Lakoff’s terms) over “facts,” acknowledgement of persons over the sharing of information. (The final lines in both stanzas of “Transient Barracks,” for example, provide no concrete details, no “brute facts,” at all: nor do the closing phrases of “90 North.”) The apparent femininity of Jarrell’s style (which led him to redraft a few poems by making their speakers clearly women) appears, at least in some poems, as a consequence of his concern to represent our need for the intersubjective. Langdon Hammer and James Longenbach have both shown how Jarrell’s “semifeminine” tones and attitudes help him (in Hammer’s phrase) “disengage literature from power” (Letters 19; “Who” 392). His speech patterns and syntactical choices perform this separation in order to imagine selves and speakers who need one another—they imagine the interpersonal.

To evoke the interpersonal is in Jarrell’s poems to fulfill a wish. The alienated modern man in “Jamestown” who asks a witch to “make me what I am” has been absorbed into the social and institutional, as against the interpersonal; he cannot assimilate difference, cannot change, and his imperviousness to enchantment reflects his lack of imagination (CP 257). But the man in the later “A Man Meets a Woman in the Street” who wishes to stay as he is describes an ideal condition, since he already has the intimacy he needs. His wish fulfillment is very literally a mutual recognition; at the end of the poem, the man’s wife turns to see him catching up to her:

The end of this poem (among the last Jarrell wrote) deploys all his stylistic devices in order to present a wish fulfilled—the wish for “recognition,” which justifies a life and lets the poem end. The man’s satisfaction consists in a series of equivalences: his wish is his life, his wife is the wife, his day the day, for which he had hoped. Jarrell’s play among ordinary words establishes just those equivalences.

“Recognition” became in Jarrell’s last poems his own word for what his characters seek. For the psychoanalytic thinker Jessica Benjamin, erotic love (as distinct from sexual desire) constitutes precisely an achievement of recognition, a fulfilled wish to be known and changed by another: “the desire for erotic union with another person who is endowed with the capacity to transform the self can be seen as the most intense version of the desire for recognition … the point is to contact and be contacted by the other—apprehended as such” (Like 184). Such a desire creates the whole form of a much shorter, earlier love poem. After Jarrell met Mary von Schrader in 1951, he wrote this poem, “The Meteorite,” for her:

The poem depends on the fiction it builds of a singular listener—her attentions, at first as unlikely and distant as starlight and then as close as the breath in a kiss, cue the whole speech. The poet-lover-stone called “One” rests solitary in the middle, until the female star and the noun “star” return in the last lines to elevate and embrace it.³¹ Stars in love poems normally keep their distance (Keats’s “Bright Star,” Auden’s “The More Loving One”); this star comes close enough to heed a request. Like “A Man Meets a Woman in the Street,” “The Meteorite” imagines the relation between lovers as creating its own—in this case, extraterrestrial—shared space, a space as distinct as possible from the ordinary and alienating social world. Randall told Mary von Schrader, in a letter written soon after the poem’s composition, “I’ll be glad to move away from this society into Ours” (Letters 323). The experience of falling in love, of being loved, meant for Jarrell the creation of terms of intimate recognition, terms that set him (as they would set any lover) apart from the crowd, the larger “society,” of stars or stones.

If the love poems embody recognition at its most joyful, its clearest instance has to be “In Galleries.” The American museum guard at the start of this poem “has a right to despair”; in the sculpture he watches,

Nor does the guard see the visitors—he “stands / Blind, silent, among the people who go by / Indistinguishably,” like the sad shopper in the supermarket or the soldier waiting in line. The Italian museum guard in the second verse-paragraph “speaks and smiles / And whether or not you understand Italian, / You understand he is human and still hopes”: he evokes a minimal recognition (and gets a minimal tip). But the best kind of museum guard (also Italian) is piously enthusiastic. When he

The coins with which the American tips the guard are inadequate, as any recompense would be inadequate, to the experience of empathy the guard makes possible. He has, moreover, given the tourist that experience by showing him or her another depiction of empathy: a painted tear on a painted arm. “The visitor as well as the guard,” Suzanne Ferguson writes, “must come alive to make the miracle happen” (Poetry 195). Jarrell highlights the pity involved in Christian religious awe in order to redescribe its virtues in human, secular terms. That guard’s “gestures,” the poem says, “are full of faith in—of faith”; but the painting (according to Mary Jarrell, a Verona Pietá—she does not say which one) inspires in Jarrell not an assent to religious faith but an experience of human community.³²

If “In Galleries” and “A Man Meets a Woman” demonstrate the recognitions the poems seek, “Seele im Raum” presents their more usual dilemma: a protagonist who can’t be recognized or individuated by the other people she sees. Given pride of place in The Seven-League Crutches (1951, “Seele im Raum” describes a woman who for years had seen, or hallucinated, a friendly eland at her dinner table. The speaker’s breakings- and trailings-off announce the reality of the eland, even if “they”—her family—cannot see it. The eland seems present inasmuch as it resists words:

Jarrell’s woman felt overlooked by her husband or children: the eland seemed to know her as they could not. (She learns later that “elend” in German means “wretched.”) The eland comes into being in response to the state of mind Nancy Chodorow later named “lack of self, or emptiness. This happens especially when a person who has this feeling is with others who read the social and emotional setting differently but do not recognize this, nor recognize that the person herself is in a different world.” Chodorow suggests, following the psychoanalyst Enid Balint, “that women are more likely to experience themselves this way. Women who feel empty of themselves feel that they are not being accorded a separate reality nor the agency to interpret the world their own way” (Mothering 100).

It would be almost right to say (as other commentators have said) that the eland represents imagination, or the woman’s “separate reality.”³³ It would be truer to say that the eland is the companion, even the listener, the imagination creates so that it may be recognized: when the eland tried “a long useless time to speak” and “looked with its great melting tearless eyes … Into my eyes, and whispered to me,” it acts out a desperate approximation of exchanges like the one at the end of “In Galleries.” The woman suggests, and no one argues otherwise, that if the eland isn’t real, isn’t compatible with “real life,” then real life may not be worth living. Later she asks, in lines rich with self-interruptions,

The “thing” that can be shown and remembered but not directly described is something like a soul; it is the part of her left over after she fulfills her social role. This soul or “thing” has summoned up (hallucinated, or created) the eland because souls require acknowledgement and do not get it: “And yet when it was, I was—[…] Yet how can I believe it?” As Hammer puts it, “The eland is the embodiment of her will to imagine another life, a full sensual life in which one’s desire need not be postponed or dismissed as make-believe” (“Who” 405).

This desire can appear more specifically as a desire for interpersonal channels, a companionable remedy for her “lack of self.” A husband who saw the eland would therefore see how wretched, elend, the woman has been. Part of “Seele im Raum” adapts Rilke’s “The Unicorn,” which Jarrell translated; Rilke’s unicorn, like the housewife’s eland, becomes real because human beings require its company:

And this is why we see the eland at dinner. In Pictures from an Institution a succession of dinner parties and household scenes offer models for good and bad kinds of sociability. One bad kind appears in the novelist Gertrude Johnson, who lacks empathetic imagination: Gertrude sees everyone, save her husband Sidney, as “material”—“she listened only As A Novelist” (131). Desperate for recognition and empathy, the woman of “Seele im Raum” imagines the eland as her friend and companion. Gertrude reverses “Seele im Raum” exactly, since she sees all her companions as elands: “‘It’s nice not to have to lie out at some water-hole with a flash-bulb,’ I heard her say once, ‘but just to be able to ask your eland home to dinner.’ The listening elands laughed and swallowed” (35).

Like many of Jarrell’s poems, “Seele im Raum” addresses interiority with the syntax proper to conversation: it depends on the tension it maintains between the diction and forms of conversation (dinner conversation, say) and the abstract, “higher” language traditionally associated with lyric poems (such as Rilke’s “Unicorn”). That tension becomes another way to imagine Jarrell’s intersubjective project. Often Jarrell’s most lyrical passages ask whether the voices they project can ever be manifest in the real, shared world. Such questions drive several mysterious poems from the 1950s, among them “The Orient Express”:

Here, as in “Seele im Raum,” a desire to present plausible speakers, to create characters who seem like “other people” and show their need to relate—a desire we might call novelistic, or (following Bakhtin) dialogic—exists in tension with lyric’s drive to present an inner being separate from social circumstance, an “I” both more specific and more universal than the social types and representatives of the novel. In the terms of “The Orient Express,” the novelistic presents the facts, the “gray mask” of the external world, the lyric the “some thing / Behind everything.” And in the terms of “Seele im Raum,” the novelistic presents only “the skin of being”; pure lyric presents the “raw thing” within. It is when the two versions of persons—the novelistic and the lyric, the exterior and the interior—are given shared ground, shared words, that intersubjective recognitions can take place.

The tangled-up, self-interrupting syntax in “Seele im Raum” thus suggests that if the woman—if anyone—has a “naked” being, an interior or imagining self apart from her roles, that interior self has to be understood through hard-to-share speech. Once deprived of her eland, she can “be” only when explaining it to others: “Being is being old / And saying … ‘To own an eland: that’s what I call life!’” Like many repeated terms in Jarrell’s poetry (“wish,” for example, in “Next Day” and “A Man Meets a Woman …”), “being” becomes what William Empson called a Complex Word and makes a Statement in Words; it includes the noun “human being”; “being” as existence; “being” as the carrier of an adjective (being married, being tall, being American—having the qualities by which others know us); and “being inside” (having a psyche).³⁵ These versions of being prove hard to reconcile; their incompatibility requires lonely people to invent companions like elands—or like the readers implied by certain poems.

Jarrell has been praised for his mastery of the dramatic monologue, or of forms allied to it.³⁶ Robert Langbaum argues in a well-known study that dramatic monologue aims “to establish the speaker’s existence, not his moral worth but his sheer existence” (Experience 200). Herbert Tucker has shown how modern readers have learned to see all poems as if they were dramatic monologues: for Tucker (who disapproves of it) this modern practice satisfies our “thirst for intersubjective confirmation of the self” (242).³⁷ Jarrell’s characters seek precisely what Tucker claims modern readers seek. And this is why Jarrell—who in some poems (such as “A Conversation with the Devil”) speaks explicitly as a modern author—can make characters in other poems epitomize frustrated modern readers. “The Woman at the Washington Zoo” brings this conjunction to its zenith. The woman is an ordinary, sublunary self, excluded from the demesnes of imagination (foreign countries, beast fables, science fiction), which taunt her with unapproachable proximity:

Shakespeare’s “dyer’s hand,” “almost subdued / To th’element it works in” is a well-known trope for artistic creation.³⁸ But when Jarrell reused the allusion in the 1960 essay “A Sad Heart at the Supermarket,” he was complaining that conformism, capitalism, consumer culture, subdue our individual natures: he wrote there that “mass culture’s”

This Washingtonian seems all too “representative,” one of the “poor unknown failures” Jarrell’s essay later invokes; Jarrell described her elsewhere as “a kind of aging machine part,” “a distant relation” to the housewife in “Seele im Raum” (SH 71; KA 320). Both women (in D. W. Winnicott’s words) have “become one of the many who do not feel that they exist in their own right as whole human beings” (29).

The woman at the zoo addresses a vulture, with perverse hope, as her “wild brother.” Crying out to him, in quintessentially Jarrellian repetitions, “You know what I was, / You see what I am: change me, change me!,” she seeks from the vulture-brother-fantasy-companion (as the readers in Jarrell’s poems about libraries sought from books) an individuating recognition that both permits, and constitutes, being “changed” (CP 216).³⁹ The colorless woman at the zoo has been taken to complain of sexual loneliness.⁴⁰ But as much as she thrills at, and dreads, the sexuality of the vulture image, the Woman also seems here to be complaining that she has no part in imaginative creation. If the woman’s invisibility is her problem, a change in who she is will either make possible, or constitute, the solution.

Several of Jarrell’s other protagonists also cry out for “change”; the children in “Children Selecting Books in a Library,” for example, seek “CHANGE, dear to all things not to themselves endeared” (CP 107). These characters want at once to dispose of their familiar selves and to reveal those selves to someone else: for them being changed amounts to being recognized, and the problem the Woman faces is that each seems a prerequisite for the other. She has to be different in order to be noticed and has to be noticed to seem individuated, different. Jessica Benjamin equates the wish for psychic change with the wish for recognition and both with the wish for confirmation of selfhood: for her the self “is reciprocally constituted in relation to the other, dependent on the other’s recognition, which it cannot have without being negated, acted on by the other, in a way that changes the self, making it nonidentical” (Shadow 79). Finding no such recognition in life, the Woman at the Washington Zoo seeks it in fantasy, just as readers seek it in literature. We therefore recognize her; as readers of modern literature, we understand her dilemma as the animals and the diplomats cannot. And it may indicate the Woman’s success as a model of reading that Jarrell wrote his own essay about this poem at the request of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, who printed it in the third edition of Understanding Poetry.

I have argued that Jarrell’s style pivots on his sense of loneliness and on the intersubjectivity he sought as a response. Loneliness, the social psychologist Linda Wood argues, “is failed intersubjectivity”; as such, she continues, it is “paradoxically the most social” of imputed emotions (188–190). To come from the explorer of “90 North” to the Woman at the Washington Zoo and the shopper of “Next Day” is to see how Jarrell,’s psychological interests prompt sociological ones. The people in poems such as “The Woman at the Washington Zoo,” or “Next Day,” or “The Sick Nought” risk and fear becoming mere social types: the (or any) new soldier, the (or any) housewife, the (or any) bored student, “anybody.” Jarrell’s drafts of “Next Day” include a prose sketch that summarizes the poem’s concerns about personal distinction, bound up as they are with concerns about mortality:

Is she “typical” just because she is aging? Will that process erase her “complicated life,” which separates her from “anybody” else? Critics who find the woman unrealistic (because she reads William James) exhibit just the stereotyped reactions she fears, overlooking her and seeing only the social group to which she belongs.⁴¹ Jarrell’s fictive housewife, looked at askance for her reading, thus resembles the real “upper-middlebrow” housewife in William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man, who surprised her neighbors by reading Plato and told Whyte, “Now all of them are sure I’m strange” (365).⁴²

Just as the poems’ speakers feel in danger of fading into indistinguishability, the classes they represent threaten to become the poems’ topics, to make them unimaginable as individuals. “Next Day”—a representation of one lonely woman, distinguished from others by Jarrell’s language – has looked to many readers like a poem about commodity culture, whose typical victim can buy Cheer and Joy but never cheer or joy.⁴³ The poem, as we have seen, depends on repeated words—“all,” “wise,” “wish,” “see,” “flesh,” “imagining,” “now,” “change,” “face,” “old,” “body,” “exceptional.” If these words sketch the woman’s problems, they also trope the identical commodities at the start of the poem. Lined up on “shelves,” these are notionally various but fundamentally indistinguishable—just like the “selves” who buy them, in whose ranks the woman of “Next Day” fears she belongs. Jarrell elsewhere encouraged such a reading; he asked in the essay “A Sad Heart at the Supermarket,”

“Next Day” is hardly the only poem whose story of loneliness, selfhood, and failed intersubjectivity also leads to a kind of social criticism. If Jarrell’s focus on loneliness led him out toward other, “ordinary,” people, his interest in social and cultural threats to individuality, and to its recognition, led him to portray those threats in his works. Jarrell depicts particulars of wartime life; makes poems out of changes in American reading, viewing, and listening habits; and notices changes in the built environment, education, and consumption (from the supermarket to the elementary classroom and the postal service). Later chapters will view more of those social and historical phenomena as they affected Jarrell’s verse. The next chapter, however, will show how, and why, they inform his prose.