Randall Jarrell showed us how to read his contemporaries; we do not yet know how to read him. Often he seems to have understood the writers around him as posterity would: for some poets (such as Robert Lowell and Robert Frost) he helped to shape that posterity, while for others (such as Elizabeth Bishop) he prefigured it. Many readers know Jarrell as the author of several anthology poems (for example, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”), a charming book or two for children, and a panoply of influential reviews. This book aims to illuminate a Jarrell more ambitious, more complex, and more important than that. He is ambitious partly because his writings refuse certain public ambitions. He is complex in part because his verse style tries so variously to use the artless simplicities of nonliterary speech. And he is important partly because he tells us to forget whether a book seems important, and to care instead for what strikes us as good.
The peers Jarrell admired most—Bishop and Lowell—now belong to a so-called mainstream of American poetry, to which more “radical” or disjunctive writers are said to offer alternatives. Jarrell did not anticipate those developments—if anything, they have made him harder to understand. To see how Jarrell wrote and how to read him is to see how he read his era, and how far his work stands from the course most American poets have followed since his death. It is also to see how Jarrell’s literary practice anticipated discoveries in Continental philosophy, in feminist psychology, even in political theory. And it is, finally, to see what he accomplished. To do so, we need to begin with ideas of the self.
Jarrell considered himself first and last a poet; his best-known prose concerns other poets’ poetry. Poetry—or lyric poetry, or poetry since the Romantic era—is frequently said to have as its province the inner life, or the psyche, or the self. That general vocation for poetry became Jarrell’s special project. His poems and prose describe the distances between the self and the world, the self and history, the self and the social givens within which it is asked to behave. They show how the self seeks fantasy, and how it turns to memory, as refuges from the demands the world makes on it, or from (worse yet) the world’s neglect. And they examine how the self seeks confirmation of its continuing existence, a confirmation it can finally have only through other people.
What does it mean to have a self to defend? Irving Howe writes that “by asserting the presence of the self, I counterpose to all imposed definitions of place and function a persuasion that I harbor something else, utterly mine—a persuasion that I possess a center of individual consciousness that is active and, to some extent, coherent” (249–50). The philosopher Charles Taylor has shown how ideas of the self have evolved alongside “certain notions of inwardness, which are … peculiarly modern” (498). The kinds of selves we find in modern literature, with their never fully revealed interior lives and their ties to autobiography (what Taylor would call “expressive” selves) have often been traced to early Romantic writers (Wordsworth, Goethe) or else to psychoanalysis. More than other American poets, Jarrell made sustained and self-conscious use of those sources.
According to Taylor, we have “come to think that we ‘have’ selves as we have heads. But the very idea that we have or are ‘a self,’ that human agency is essentially defined as ‘the self,’ is a linguistic reflection of our modern understanding” (177). Taylor does not, however, wish to do away with the self: he does not think that we moderns should or can.1 Other thinkers—especially those indebted to Michel Foucault—have liked to suggest that our notions of the self (or individuality, or interiority) are not only historically contingent but obsolescent, ethically suspect, and politically retrograde. Writing before poststructuralism exerted much influence on American letters, Jarrell took up other challenges to the self, challenges he saw throughout mid-century culture—in supermarkets, in army barracks, in classrooms and lecture halls, on TV, and even within the family. Against all these he insisted that some sense of our presence in our own history, and of our inward difference from the rest of the world, remained prerequisite for our life with other people, for aesthetic experience, and even for ethical action.
Certain concepts of the self have been attacked as implausibly universal, as tending to erase certain sorts of difference. Jarrell’s manifestations of selfhood may be seen instead as defenses of difference, among people and among works of art. “That others are now, were, and ever shall be, world without end, different,” he asks in his only novel, “what else is Romance?” (Pictures 176). Far from affirming a complacent, unchanging self (a self that is the possessor of possessions), Jarrell often defends a self he sees as nearly powerless against social forces—against the disempowerment of the young or the losses entailed in growing old.2 The desire to have and show an inner self is for Jarrell the same thing as the desire to change that self: to be is to change, and so Jarrell’s existentially challenged characters respond to systems and situations that seem to erase their inner being with the repeated, insistent plea for change. One well-known poem, “The Woman at the Washington Zoo,” ends with the plea “change me, change me!” Elsewhere a new appreciation of a difficult artwork (Berg’s Lyric Suite) makes Jarrell’s narrator “grateful for the best of gifts, a change in one’s own self” (Pictures 151). Children matter to Jarrell not least because they are guaranteed to change; Jarrell’s adults fear that they have become fixed, identical with mere social roles, so that the only change left for them is death. Jarrell’s works cohere as defenses of the private self—but for him, in what seems only a paradox, to be oneself is to be able to change; to be always and only the same is not to be at all.
My title plays on Jarrell’s first and best-known book of essays, Poetry and the Age, and on his preoccupations with youth, age, and aging—the first and last ways in which any self will change. “The taste of the age is, always, a bitter one,” one of his essays begins. His work reacted to Auden’s The Age of Anxiety (a poem Jarrell hated), to the fifties, and to the nuclear age; he liked to remind us, too, that “one judges an age, just as one judges a poet, by its best poems” (KA 290; Age 13). Jarrell also thought about his own age in years: he grew from a precocious, insecure child into an uneasy, successful young man. As an adult he avoided adult vices, entertaining children and cats while avoiding alcohol and adultery: his literary enemies called him childish, even as he worried about his advancing age. “The Woman at the Washington Zoo” describes animals “Aging, but without knowledge of their age” (CP 215); in another poem, an old woman says of “Mother and Father,” “They both look so young. / I’m so much older than they are” (CP 354). Centrally interested in old age and in childhood, his poems consider and challenge the categories into which we sort persons and on which we base our beliefs about them.
Jarrell is hardly the only poet of his era who reconsidered the self. Thomas Travisano has argued that Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, and John Berryman, whose lives and works so often intersect, collectively address “the problem of selfhood in the postmodern world” (Mid-Century 6). Though Jarrell noticed links between his work and Bishop’s, he is not often, as Bishop was, a poet of place and nature, nor of foreignness and cultural estrangement.3 Though he won praise for poems about World War II, he does not usually consider political leadership, heroism, or epic inheritance, leaving those topics instead to his friend Lowell. And though he pays frequent attention to questions of gender, Jarrell finds his special subjects neither in sex nor in the other appetites so important to Berryman. Precisely because he does not take on these issues, Jarrell attends, more than his contemporaries could, to the boundaries and to the fragilities of aesthetic and inner experience, to the self as such and its risky connections to others. No responsible reader would claim that the American mid-century—the age of late Stevens and Williams, Langston Hughes and Auden, early Ashbery and Rich—belongs to Jarrell, or to any poet, alone; my title means instead that Jarrell can help us understand his era and that to know his era well, we need to appreciate him.
My first chapter outlines Jarrell’s life. Each subsequent chapter considers a different approach to the self. Chapter 1 addresses the self as it depends on other selves; it shows how Jarrell’s poetic style depicts that interdependence. Reacting against his teachers’ insistence on poems as self-contained artifacts, Jarrell embraced Wordsworthian views of poetry as troped speech. Such views soon gave Jarrell’s verse its distinctive devices: irregular listeners, webs of quotation, multiple speakers, hesitations, self-interruptions, and subtle models of poetic listeners.
Chapter 2 looks at the self within and against society and its institutions, from the army to the academy. Jarrell’s working life encompassed the Second World War, the postwar growth of higher education, the concerns about conformity that marked the fifties, and the anxiety about mass cultural forms which continued into the sixties. All of these sharpened Jarrell’s sense that literature in general, and his own work in particular, had to distinguish individuals from their social roles. He tried to do so consistently in essays, where his prose style gave him dazzling instruments of appreciation and judgment; it gave him, as well, the means to portray aesthetic experience as something apart from, even opposed to, professional and disciplinary activity. Such portraits, and such contrasts, animate Jarrell’s comic novel, Pictures from an Institution.
Chapter 3 considers psychoanalytic models of the self—conscious and unconscious, dreaming and waking. Indebted to 1930s Gestalt theory, to Freud and to Freud’s heirs, Jarrell reimagined the unconscious, dream work, the death wish, and the persistence of early desires. Where his “confessional” peers cast themselves as patients, Jarrell identified with psychoanalysts: his poems thus explore the intersubjective components of psychoanalysis and of emotion itself.
Chapter 4 examines the self in time, considering how the “I” who speaks a poem or lives a life may understand its past. The chapter begins with philosophical issues concerning personal identity and briefly takes up Jarrell’s use of Proust; it then shows how certain poems about old age, middle age, and childhood use verbal repetition to depict the persistence of the self.
Chapters 5 and 6 take up kinds of selves, showing how Jarrell investigates assumptions and intuitions about men, women, youth, parents, and children. Every reader has noted Jarrell’s interests in childhood; few see the related interests he took in adolescence, as a newly important social phenomenon (“teenagers”) and as an inward stage of emotional life. Chapter 5 considers these interests, concluding with a discussion of one of his neglected long poems.
Chapter 6 looks at mothers, fathers and families; it considers several short poems and a children’s book before delving into The Lost World, a late, long poem based on a year of Jarrell’s childhood, and a poem that combines almost all his techniques and interests. My epilogue takes up depictions and valuations of the self in poems and prose about visual art, asking—as Jarrell asked—whether the self can ever be fully depicted. Often I try to advance my general claims through sustained readings of single poems; one of my goals is to demonstrate that Jarrell’s poems reward such attention.
Most of the models and theories in this book are ones that Jarrell would have known—those of Freud, for example, or of Jarrell’s close friend Hannah Arendt. One exception is my use of object-relations psychoanalysis, a body of thought created in part by the British child analyst D. W. Winnicott. For Winnicott, much human experience has its origins in young children’s discovery of distinctions between “I” and “you,” self and other, self and mother: children discover a space (“potential space”) that may count as self or other, or both. Children then find and cathect “transitional objects” (such as a security blanket), which occupy that space. As we grow up, we continue to draw, emotionally and intellectually, on this early “experience in the potential space between the subjective object and the object objectively perceived, between me-extensions and the not-me” (100).4
Drawing on Continental philosophers from Hegel to Lévinas, Jessica Benjamin and other feminist thinkers have modified Winnicott’s models. Benjamin focuses on “recognition,” a kind of intimacy in which I acknowledge my difference from the person with whom I am intimate: “A person comes to feel that ‘I … am the author of my acts,’ by being with another person who recognizes her acts, her feelings, her intentions, her existence, her independence. … The subject declares ‘I am, I do,’ and then waits for the response, ‘You are, you have done’” (Bonds 21). Such “experiences of ‘being with’ are predicated on a continually evolving awareness of difference, on a sense of intimacy felt as occurring between ‘the two of us’” (Bonds 47).5 The poet and critic Allen Grossman has made such encounters a paradigm for poems: “In speaking the poem the speaker of the poem reacquires selfhood by serious reciprocity with another self” (258).6 For Benjamin all of us seek recognition: people who cannot find it, or failed to find it early enough, tend to imagine life as a choice between loneliness, painful self-consciousness, and separation (from mothers and mother surrogates) on the one hand and unconsciousness, merging (with mother figures) on the other. Alan Williamson has already found just such choices at the core of Jarrell’s work.7
Some of Jarrell’s best interpreters were his contemporaries. Reviews, letters, and the occasional poem by Lowell, Bishop, Karl Shapiro, Delmore Schwartz, and others who knew Jarrell personally have been consistently helpful, as has Mary von Schrader Jarrell, in person and through her memoir, Remembering Randall. I am also indebted to previous books about Jarrell’s poems, among them Suzanne Ferguson’s 1972 survey and monographs by Sister Bernetta Quinn and Charlotte Beck. William Pritchard’s Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life is invaluable as a biography. Persuasive recent essays by Langdon Hammer and James Longenbach consider Jarrell’s relations to gender and power and have provided me with important points of departure.8 Travisano’s volume illuminates Jarrell’s interactions with his colleagues and friends. Richard Flynn’s monograph, Randall Jarrell and the Lost World of Childhood, and especially his subsequent essays, relate the poems well to the cultural criticism and have been important sources for agreement and disagreement. Closest to my approach in some ways has been Williamson, whose psychoanalytically grounded essay (now part of his recent book, Almost a Girl) demonstrates how often in Jarrell “separation is cosmic lostness; unity is engulfment, loss of self” (“Märchen” 288).
Other readers approach Jarrell through lenses I have not used. Though I begin with his first important poems and end with his last, I do not proceed book by book; Jarrell arranged his work (in his 1955 Selected Poems) in ways that stressed thematic continuities, and I have done likewise here. I have not devoted discrete chapters to war poems or to poems in the voices of women; both groups are examined throughout the book.9 I have largely left Jarrell’s many uses of operatic and orchestral music to critics more qualified to appreciate them. Though Jarrell has been viewed as a Southern writer, he rarely thought of himself that way; his Southern teachers believed him Californian or Jewish.10 Jarrell translated Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, Goethe’s Faust, Part 1, and lyric poems by Rilke and other European authors; his translations have received attention elsewhere, and I do not dwell on them here.11 Both Edward Brunner’s Cold War Poetry and Deborah Nelson’s Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America appeared too late to inform this book; though neither covers Jarrell at length, both bear on my claims, particularly those of Chapters 2 and 6.
A final note concerns Jarrell’s vexing and premature death. Continuing arguments about his demise have done more to distract us from his poems than they have to illuminate them. Those arguments have, however, alerted readers to what Mary Kinzie calls his “undercurrent of nihilism” (72). His poems about selves reaching out to other selves often consider how those attempts can fail. I have tried here to show how Jarrell’s poems and prose operate, what they can teach us, what his characters need, how some of them find it, and how aesthetic experience can console them when they do not. Those attempts should not occlude the pessimism he manifests sometimes as a bitter detachment, sometimes as a positive wish to leave the world: those overtones can prove hard to build into arguments, but they remain a part of his work that readers should not ignore.