Randall Jarrell and His Age

1. For Taylor’s skepticism about “contemporary neo-Nietzschean doctrines of overcoming the self or ‘the subject,’” see 526–527; theories that “purport to reconnect us with some larger reality, social or natural” are in his view “less adequately described as negations of the self than they are as ways of understanding its embedding in interlocution” (527).

2. Relevant here are a broad range of more or less feminist, guardedly communitarian, and postpoststructuralist ways of reconstructing persons and agents, many of which appear in Levine; others can be found in Linda Marie Brooks’s Alternative Identities. Brooks contrasts “the singular Western subject … whose existence rests on positing and … appropriating its objects” to several versions of what she and David Roberts name “the weak self”—a person or agent who exists, and has experiences, by means of relationships and within a historical frame (7, 12).

3. On Jarrell’s relations with Bishop, see Longenbach 58–59, 62.

4. Another tradition of object-relations psychology is represented by Melanie Klein. On Jarrell’s most Kleinian poems (such as “A Quilt-Pattern”), see Williamson, “Märchen”; see also chapter 3.

5. Hagenbuchle, who argues for the omnipresence of a Jungian “black goddess” in Jarrell’s work, anticipates Williamson in some respects.

6. Charles Altieri also finds that our senses of self are bound up with our need for unique others and that we experience both in literary reading: “At the very core of our being for itself we find impulses we realize are inseparable from the possibility of others playing their roles in this communal exchange of identifications and affirmations” (Canons 304–305).

7. See Williamson, “Märchen,” passim. Eric Murphy Selinger has also used Jessica Benjamin to discuss poetry, though his book on American love poems does not mention Jarrell. For general remarks and cautions about object-relations psychology and literature, see Skura, esp. 173–174 and 185–190; see also her chapter 6.

8. Hammer argues that Jarrell’s work and his life, with their emphases on the private, the feminine, and the domestic, react against and hence bear constant traces of (masculine) institutions; Longenbach agrees, but focuses on Jarrell’s relations to older male poets and to Elizabeth Bishop. For more on both arguments, see my chapters 1 and 6.

9. For Jarrell’s war poems as records of military life, see especially Fussell; on military flying, see Vardamis.

10. Tate recalled that Jarrell “was of Tennessee parentage, brought up, I believe, in California” (RJ 231). Ransom seems always to have believed that Jarrell was Jewish: he wrote to Tate in 1957, “I’ve always respected [Jarrell] for the way he will pitch into a question which puts the Jew at a disadvantage, even though he might pass for a Gentile if he kept quiet” (Selected Letters 395).

11. On the translations, see Cross and Seidler, both in CE.

1. The brothers were never close. Charles would move to France and marry a French woman, and he played almost no role in Randall’s adult life. Mary recalls only one visit from Charles during her fourteen years of marriage to Randall, and the Letters record only one earlier stay.

2. For more on this letter and the Tennessee family, see Pritchard 13–15. Another commentator on the youthful Jarrell, Richard Flynn, tends to blame Jarrell’s later troubles on his parents’ divorce: see Lost 4–5.

3. Among other commentators on young Randall’s troubles, Pritchard emphasizes Anna’s uncertain mental state and Flynn the family’s instability. Travisano and Williamson both find that the relations between the “narcissistic” Anna and the bookish young Randall follow patterns described in Alice Miller’s Drama of the Gifted Child: see Mid-Century 100–105 and “Märchen” 289–290. Flynn, followed gingerly by Travisano, suspects physical or sexual abuse: see Lost 18 and Mid-Century 104–105.

4. For a good summary of Jarrell’s high school writings, see Pritchard 21–22.

5. “I have a friend,” Jarrell wrote Amy Breyer, “who is a good friend of Isherwood’s, and who knows Auden; he says they think I am good, but that when he asked Auden how he liked my article on him Auden just looked sad” (Berg Collection, n.d.). For a long analysis of the supposedly oedipal quarrel with Auden, see Sansom.

6. “We have moved to Jamaica and see trees, birds and children outside our windows,” Randall wrote to John Berryman in March (University of Minnesota, 28 March 1947).

7. Empson’s No Exit review came too late to be used, because Empson had mailed it from China: it appeared, with my own introduction, in the New York Review of Books (21 June 2001).

8. Brooks’ talk appeared in the program to the Yale memorial service for Jarrell; it is the only substantial talk there not reprinted in RJ.

9. According to Mary, Randall and Mackie had taken—and Randall therefore occupied alone—the house of Princeton professor Donald Stauffer, on leave for 1951–52; reports of Randall’s untidiness during that year come mostly from his unwillingness to do dishes (Mary Jarrell, conversation).

10. Jarrell’s former students at Greensboro—among them the writers Heather Ross Miller, Kelly Cherry, and Sylvia Wilkinson—wrote many reminiscences of his teaching; most appeared in Greensboro publications or remain in manuscript. The best discussion of these is Quinn, Randall Jarrell, 131–142.

11. The best account of debates about his death is probably Pritchard 290–298; others have ended up prurient or lurid.

12. Jarrell’s local paper, the Greensboro Record, remarked in a 1975 tribute, “No ivory-tower poet-scholar, he was an avid and talented tennis player” (Beinecke, Randall Jarrell file). Jarrell perhaps played tennis in part so people would say this about him.

1. Sven Birkerts finds “Next Day” “as much as any poem can be, representative” (“Randall Jarrell” 86). Chris Wallace-Crabbe decides that “‘Solitary’ is an excellent word for [“Next Day”] to end on, for that is what Jarrell’s poetry … is all about” (58).

2. For more commentary on “Next Day,” see Birkerts, “Randall Jarrell” 83–89, Pritchard 301–302, Shapiro, RJ 206–210, and Travisano, Mid-Century 275–276.

3. Even some of Jarrell’s studious defenders have claimed that his poems never found a style of their own: Suzanne Ferguson’s 1972 study found his achievement instead in “characters and themes” (5).

4. Suzanne Ferguson calls “90 North” “Jarrell’s first fully characteristic poem, and one of his best,” while Jarrell’s biographer William Pritchard dubs “90 North” the “strongest early intimation of Jarrell’s distinctiveness as a poet” (Poetry 19: 81).

5. See, for example, Beck Worlds 31 (“His speakers … never … benefit from human interaction”); for other such views, see Kinzie, Mazzaro, and Vendler, “Inconsolable.”

6. Jarrell is sometimes credited with having coined the term postmodernist, in a 1947 review of Robert Lowell. John Crowe Ransom used the adjective to describe Jarrell’s own poems in 1941—according to Thomas Travisano, the first use of postmodernist with reference to literature; see Travisano’s introduction to “Levels and Opposites” 695. For earlier uses of postmodern, see Longenbach 3.

7. For a later diagnosis of solitude as “part of the evolving self-image of modernism,” see Bromwich, Choice 254–255.

8. The poem presents interesting problems for dating other poems, since on its verso are stanzas from “The Tower,” which the Complete Poems dates to 1951 (the year it appeared in Kenyon Review); either Jarrell did not publish “The Tower” for several years after he wrote it, or he was interested in a tribute to Engels as late as 1950–51.

9. For Altieri’s explanation of third-, second- and first-person commitments, see Canons: “When the ‘I’ turns to the singular ‘you,’ it seeks a relationships defined not by general rules but by specific conditions of adjustment and attunement.… The ‘you’ engages us concretely in what the ‘he’ or ‘she’ opens for us” (306).

10. None of the articles appeared; Charlotte Beck suggest that Jarrell never finished an essay on Wordsworth simply because no one had commissioned one (Worlds 11).

11. Longenbach claims plausibly that “when [‘The End of the Line’] was published in the early forties, its argument was unheard of, except by devoted readers of Stevens” (10). David Perkins recalled in 1982 that as late at the 1950s “no powerful body of contemporary criticism … presented the romantics favorably” (561).

12. When Jarrell writes, in “A Front,” of “bombers banging / Like lost trucks down the levels of the ice,” he seems to be remembering the thunder in book 2 of The Excursion, “roaring sound, that ceases not to flow, / Like smoke, along the level of the blast” (CP 173; Excursion 2:699–703). When Jarrell writes, in “The Emancipators,” “the apple shone / Like a seashell through your prism, voyager,” he invokes Wordsworth’s famous lines on a statue at Cambridge “Of Newton with his prism and silent face, / The marble index of a mind for ever / Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone” (CP 120; Prelude 1850 3:61–63). Helen Hagenbuchle finds links between Jarrell’s early “The Skaters” and Wordsworth’s ice-skating episode in the Prelude (104–106). For a detailed discussion of “The Emancipators” see Nemerov 193–197.

13. For more on Wordsworth, sympathy, and acknowledgement, see Bromwich, Disowned, esp. 23–25 and 88–91, and Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging.”

14. Fussell explains that “try as [Jarrell] will to overcome the implications of [the war’s] multitudinousness and … uniformity and consider this soldier as a unique person, he can’t make it” (67). For more on wartime anonymity, see Fussell 59–63, 66–69, and chapter 6; see also my chapter 2.

15. For a longer, later excursus on this theme, along with its derivation from Freud, see “Stories” xii–xiii.

16. For Grossman on “hermeneutic friendship” and “care,” see 284–287 and 368–371: “one [friend] seeks to keep the other in being” (370).

17. Spender noted the changes in meter from stanza to stanza in “The Island” in his review of The Seven League Crutches (182).

18. For more on “speech” and “The Christmas Roses,” see Ferguson, Poetry 30, Longenbach 54–55, and Hammer “Who” 403–404.

19. See, for example, Longenbach 55 and Hammer 403.

20. Wallace-Crabbe, for example, diagnoses “Jarrell’s indifference to closure, his unwillingness to assemble the well-made poem” (49).

21. On Jarrell’s use of War and Children, see Flynn, Lost 46–47.

22. Dickey made “The Truth” a test case—one of his personae calls it “damned poor metrically,” while the other exclaims, “if that doesn’t move you, you ought to be boiled down for soap” (RJ 46).

23. Pritchard has noted the war poems’ debt to Pyle: see 122–123. Wallace-Crabbe praises Jarrell’s “other voices,” Dickey his verisimilitude, both with specific reference to “Transient Barracks,” whose “G.I. can of beets” gives Dickey part of his title (53; Reader 338–339). For other praise of “Transient Barracks,” see Pritchard 124–127.

24. Bromwich comments on the same passage: see Disowned 22. For more on Arendt’s often invoked distinction between solitude (a necessary condition for original thought) and loneliness (in which thought seems impossible), see The Life of the Mind, book 1, chapter 9, esp. 74–75. For more on Jarrell and Arendt, see chapter 2.

25. For other comments on mirrors in Jarrell, see Frances Ferguson, CE 170 and Quinn, CE 80; see also the discussion of “A Ghost, A Real Ghost” in chapter 4.

26. A considerable secondary literature concerns apostrophe and prosopopoeia (poetic address to an inanimate object), a device Jarrell rarely uses: see Kneale, esp. 141–146.

27. Alfred Kazin remembered that in person “Randall was as full of quotations as a Unitarian minister—they were his theology, too” (RJ 91). Keith Monroe has discussed “the submerged or unattributed quotation[s] and the altered cliché[s]” that animate Jarrell’s criticism (CE 263–264).

28. Another sociolinguist, Jennifer Coates, records a widespread belief that “so” as an adverbial intensifies characterizes women’s speech (20). Coates has also described the persistent, and sexist, belief “that women often produce half-finished sentences” (25).

29. Mary Kinzie explains that Jarrell “seemed to many [readers] to have split his imagination in two” (67). Vendler writes that Jarrell put “his passivity into his poetry, his ferocity into his criticism” (“Inconsolable” 36). See Longenbach, chapter 4 (“Randall Jarrell’s Semi-Feminine Mind”) for an extended, insightful discussion of this split.

30. For another discussion of this poem, “To Be Dead,” see Longenbach 55.

31. For Mary’s account of the genesis of “The Meteorite,” see Remembering 9–11; for Randall’s letter about the piece of obsidian that prompted it, see Letters 258; for the letter in which he enclosed the completed poem, see Letters 261–262.

32. Mary Jarrell identified the painting in a December 1977 letter to Sister Bernetta Quinn (cited in Quinn, Randall Jarrell 88). For more on “In Galleries,” see Quinn, Randall Jarrell 86–89.

33. Russell Fowler argues that the woman of “Seele im Raum” is “childlike,” therefore “exceptionally fortunate … She has not lost her ‘soul,’ like most of the ‘adults’ of Jarrell’s poetry” (CE 183). Charlotte Beck, on the other hand, believes her “psychotic”; Pritchard considers the eland “a symbol for her sickness” (Worlds 19; 270). Suzanne Ferguson’s nuanced reading explains the eland as a “projection” that seems, after the woman is cured of her illness, to represent the incommunicability of experience: “the outer world inevitably falsifies the inner” (Poetry 151–154).

34. For Jarrell’s own short note on the German sources, see CP 5.

35. On Complex Words and “Statements in Words,” see Empson, Complex, chapter 2.

36. As early as 1952 Parker Tyler identified Jarrell’s chief mode as “dramatic lyrism,” though he did not define the term; William Meredith later pronounced Jarrell’s “gift … essentially dramatic, like Browning’s.” Kinzie calls him “a great twentieth-century master of the dramatic monologue” (CE 140; RJ 120; 66).

37. Tucker finds this tendency false to the genre: for him, “dramatic monologue at its best asks us to do without … the figuration of inside and outside,” of “soul” and “self,” or of soul and society (234).

38. The rural people in “A Country Life,” too, “are subdued to their own element” (CP 20). Jarrell’s commentary confirms the allusion (KA 321). He spent the summer of 1939 on Shakespeare’s sonnets, working alongside—and quarreling with—Ransom: see Robert Lowell’s account (RJ 101–102). Auden published The Dyer’s Hand in 1962, two years after The Woman at the Washington Zoo.

39. Michel Benamou devotes an entire essay to the repetitions in this poem: see CE 241–244. For a skeptical reading of “change” here and elsewhere in Jarrell, see Pritchard 274.

40. Benfey suggests that part of her wants to be raped; Suzanne Ferguson calls her “neurotically hysterical.” (130; Poetry 188) Jarrell’s own explication tells us that “her own life is so terrible to her that, to change, she is willing to accept” even “the obscene sexuality of the flesh-eating death-bird,” whose sexual trappings are, “she hopes or pretends or desperately is sure … merely external” (KA 326).

41. Pritchard, for example, complains that its speaker is “not a real housewife” (300).

42. The Plato reader is actually one of Whyte’s examples of well-functioning housewives, with “a rather keen consciousness of self—and the sophistication to realize that while individualistic tastes may raise eyebrows, exercising those tastes” won’t necessarily get her ostracized (365). For more on Whyte, see chapter 2.

43. For one such reading, see Karl Shapiro, CE 206–207.

1. Jarrell told Arendt, for example, “What you said about my ‘Obscurity of the Poet’ was a great pleasure to me because of the way you put it: that you were ‘intoxicated with agreement “against a world of enemies” ’” (Letters 250).

2. David Laskin reports that among the New York intellectuals of the late forties, Jarrell and Arendt “were very much on the same wavelength”; “after The Origins of Totalitarianism,” “Lowell, [Mary] McCarthy, Jarrell, [Alfred] Kazin, and [Elizabeth] Hardwick … all became zealous Arendt partisans” (158, 220). See also Laskin 158–160 and Pritchard 239.

3. Pitkin strives to disentangle “the social” from Arendt’s other concepts—from Arendt’s famous trio of labor, work, and action, and her account of public action and freedom: see esp. 194–201. Another reading of Arendt’s “social” is Lewis and Sandra Hinchman’s: “On the one side the rise of the social has diminished the private sphere by absorbing its former functions; on the other, as politics is inundated by economic demands, it can no longer fulfill its role as an arena for self-disclosure, and that impulse is forced to take refuge in intimate relationships (à la Jaspers), the last stronghold of ‘individuality’” (155).

4. For more on the esprit sérieux, see Origins 336.

5. Richard Flynn finds Riesman’s critique of “other-direction” in Jarrell’s later attacks on mass culture: see “Fairy” 8.

6. For a detailed summary of the many fifties critiques of conformity, see Pells, chapter 4. These critiques’ focus on white, and white-collar, problems, their tendency toward overstatement, and their supposed neglect of class were pointed out at the time by Harold Rosenberg in “The Orgamerican Fantasy” and have been stressed by some more recent historians: see, for example, Lears. The important point, for the literature of the period is not whether white, and white-collar Americans did conform so completely but that they felt, and described, great pressure to do so.

7. For Riesman’s comments on Stevenson and Eisenhower—made before Ike became President—see Lonely 214–215.

8. In certain ways Jarrell could not be—almost no poet or novelist has been—strictly Arendtian. George Kateb takes a plausible if extreme position when he writes that for Arendt, “in political action alone is a person revealed.… The political self, publicly presented, is thus the real self or what must pass for the real self” (8).

9. Riesman himself decided later that in a world of pressure toward togetherness, “the book … comes into its own as a guarantor of that occasional apartness which makes life viable” (Abundance 442).

10. A good example is “The Wide Prospect,” which juxtaposes the Pacific war with the scientific and industrial revolutions: “Who could have figured, when the harnesses improved / And men pumped kobolds from the coal’s young seams … The interest on that first raw capital?” (CP 185).

11. For more on this theme see Fussell, chapters 3 and 6; for more on “Losses” see Fussell 63.

12. For Jarrell’s insistence that words in poems behaved like words outside poems, see his exchange of letters with Sister Bernetta Quinn (Letters 223–225).

13. For a brief, admiring overview of American “journalism-as-criticism,” see Dickstein 63–67; on Jarrell’s rivals and contemporaries, including Blackmur and Wilson, see Dickstein, chapters 5 and 6.

14. Monroe and Birkerts offer other useful lists of his rhetorical devices: see Monroe, CE 262–264 and Birkerts, “Randall Jarrell” 90–93.

15. Such as Richards’ Principles of Literary Criticism (1925) and Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936), Burke’s Grammar of Motives (1945) and Rhetoric of Motives (1950), and Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957).

16. Jarrell is paraphrasing Eliot’s “The Perfect Critic” (1920): “the ‘historical’ and the ‘philosophical’ critics had better be called historians and philosophers quite simply. As for the rest, there are merely various degrees of intelligence” (58). On Eliot and professionalism, see also Menand, chapter 5. Eliot had also advocated “professionalism in art,” in The Egoist 5 (1918), quoted in Menand 125.

17. Guillory’s complex argument relates Eliot’s concepts of form, tradition and orthodoxy to the same concepts in the work of Cleanth Brooks and F. R. Leavis, to the Marxian concept of ideology, and to the “mass culture debate”; see Guillory 141–155.

18. For separate arguments about “modernist” critics’ “anti-professionalism,” finding in it both “a ritual of professional legitimation” and a way of defending culture in general, see Robbins 74–75.

19. Tate even decried, in 1935, “The total loss of professionalism in letters … in our age” (Essays 519). Taking examples from Henry James, Nathanael West, and other fiction writers, Thomas Strychacz argues for “a profound identity between the structure of professional discourses and of modernist writing strategies”; for him, “the economic and social rewards accruing to professionals are comparable to the cultural rewards (the symbolic capital) accruing to modernist writers” (26). On literary critics’ professionalism, see Strychacz 5–6, 22–44. On Tate’s professionalism and modernist professionalism in general, see also Hammer, Janus-Faced, chapters 1 and 3.

20. Compare Geoffrey Hartman’s uneasy 1982 remark (reviewing a book about deconstruction): “our very hope that criticism could save us from specialization … [has] identified it as the rehumanizing activity, so when it becomes technical or claims a field of its own—when criticism says, ‘Let us be like other departments of knowledge’—it seems not only to mistake but even to betray its nature” (Easy Pieces 189).

21. For related arguments—available in Jarrell’s youth—about the “nondiscursive” knowledge available in works of art, see Suzanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (New York: Mentor/NAL, 1948 [1941]).

22. Cavell writes, “Since we cannot know the world exists, its presentness to us cannot be a function of knowing. The world is to be accepted; as the presentness of other minds is not to be known, but acknowledged” (Must 324). Warner Berthoff makes a related, if less elaborate, argument about art and the apprehension of persons: “A work of literature … comes alive to imaginative consciousness … as … it makes us sensible of the reality of other persons, identified through an impressionability and power of response which we recognize and anticipate the return of in ourselves” (13).

23. A substantial body of sociological argument contrasts professions’ “autonomy” with other workers’ managed status (“heteronomy”). Eliot Friedson contrasts “administrative direction and the loss of autonomy” with “true professional autonomy”; he goes on to argue that disciplinary solidarity among professionals produces an imagined “institution” that professionals work together to defend. (71–73, 99–100). Such arguments do not contradict Jarrell’s point: for him, literary criticism ought not aspire to autonomy as a discipline; it should instead be responsible to human life outside professional frameworks of reward and outside the limits of its special methods.

24. For Jarrell’s initial, and equally negative, reaction to The Age of Anxiety, see KA 145–146.

25. Jarrell in 1941 called “Miss Emily and the Bibliographer” “the most brilliant attack on scholarship—PMLA variety—that I have ever seen” (KA 65).

26. Jarrell’s commitment to private experience should thus be distinguished from others’ commitment to “culture.” From an Eliotic or an Arnoldian viewpoint, Robbins avers, “a professional discipline that takes culture as its objects must seem to have fallen from culture, to be untrue to culture, to be in a state of contradiction, from the very moment it becomes a discipline, that is, one discipline among others within a division of intellectual labor” (18). But a language directed always toward culture in general might prove just as inadequate for describing particular readers’ experience as a language derived from “one discipline among others” would.

27. Birkerts similarly concludes that Jarrell’s “criticism is … not criticism at all, but poetry carried on by other means” (“Randall Jarrell” 93).

28. Altieri’s account of “first-person investments” also draws on Wordsworth: “In the case of disciplinary knowledge, our pleasure lies in coming to master specific practices, instruments leading to a deeper grasp of the world. But in [Wordsworth] our pleasure lies less in the contents of knowledge than in the state of the [human] subject.… The very terms of the pleasure become features of what we then reflect on as fundamental to humanity” (Canons 146).

29. Jarrell was certainly aware of the concept we now call “cultural capital” and aware that the humanities seemed to be retaining less and less of it: “We belong to a culture whose old hierarchy of values–which demanded that a girl read Pope just as it demanded that she go to church and play the pianoforte–has virtually disappeared” (Age 15–16).

30. It may be partly this aim that Marianne Moore lauded as “the abounding un-snobbishness of [Jarrell’s] heart” (RJ 127).

31. “Back in the stacks, in libraries; in bookcases in people’s living rooms; on brick-and-plank bookshelves beside studio couches, one sees big books in dark bindings, the Collected Poems of the great poets. Once, long ago, the poems were new: the book went by post—so many horses and a coach—to a man in a country house, and the letter along with it asked him to describe, evaluate and fix the place in English literature, in 12,000 words, by January 25, of the poems of William Wordsworth. And the man did. It is hard to remember that this is the way it was; harder to remember that this is the way it is” (Third 55).

32. It is, of course, also possible to read the project I have been discussing as essentially one of mystification, rendering technical insights as untechnical, expensively learned procedures as self-evident, in order to disguise the bad faith with which trained readers like Jarrell had in fact learned to make aesthetic judgments. If Jarrell’s prose does not counter such charges, or at least render them implausible, it is very hard to imagine what critic and what style could.

33. For the binder, see Letters 279. Jarrell had promised to dedicate Pictures to Arendt; when his wife, Mary, objected, he dedicated the novel to them both (Remembering 1–2). Jarrell told Arendt that Gottfried and Irene were “very like you in some of the big general things—in most of the medium sized things they’re quite different” (Letters 392).

34. Philip Rahv seems to have turned down a chapter of Pictures for Partisan Review because he believed it portrayed McCarthy. Jarrell repeatedly minimized the resemblance, writing to Rahv that “readers who know Jean Stafford best think she’s Gertrude” and complaining to Elizabeth Bishop that Pictures “to me is a serious book not about Mary McCarthy.” Arranging with Ransom to have portions of Pictures appear in Kenyon Review, Jarrell distinguished President Robbins from Harold Taylor, then president of Sarah Lawrence, but offered to “change smaller things” to avoid “get[ing] me or Kenvon into trouble” (Letters 383, 413, 366).

35. McCarthy’s novel places Jarrell in a list of poets considered for invitation to a conference: “Tate, Ransom, Miss Moore, Empson, Jarrell, Shapiro, Auden, Winters, Roethke, Lowell, Miss Bishop”(239). Jarrell noticed his name in McCarthy’s novel: see Letters 324.

36. Pictures, Riesman wrote, “bursts with its tirade against a lady novelist who ‘heartlessly’ cases a college community (the book in turn cruelly cases the lady). But Jarrell, as befits the author of The Age of Criticism, is unusually self-conscious about reflexivity for a literary man; most novelists so far as I can make out … take exploitation of their ‘material’ for granted” (Abundance 509).

37. Flo’s language reflects contemporary usage: Elizabeth Hardwick told David Laskin that at Partisan Review in the late 1930s “the Soviet Union, the Civil War in Spain, Hitler and Mussolini, were what you might call real life” (34).

38. For another view of Jarrell’s deliberate plotlessness, see Suzanne Ferguson, CE 272, 280.

39. The same bit of Emerson (also quoted in T. S. Eliot’s “Sweeney Erect”) had turned up in one of Jarrell’s fiction reviews: “As for the men whose shadows these institutions are—the men who make and break states, corporations, and academies—in Marquand’s books they are a little gray, a little ghostly, except in so far as their organizations give them bone and hue” (KA 204).

40. Donald Davie, who cared very much for architecture but could not appreciate “classical” music, explicitly mapped the distinctions between public and private, social-ethical and purely aesthetic, onto the distinction between architecture and instrumental music: see Companions 8–9, 30–31. For Riesman’s other-directed educators, “music as a way of escape in to one’s individual creative life—a private refuge—would strike many … school authorities today as selfish” (Lonely, 166).

41. For a similar device at work in George Eliot’s sentences, see Gallagher.

42. Pitkin explains that she called her book Attack of the Blob because the lurid fears in fifties disaster movies overlap with Arendt’s fears of the social. Pitkin cites earlier essays by Susan Sontag, Naomi Goldenberg, and Michael Rogin relating fifties disaster films to topical concerns: “All three suggest that the real fear was psychological, reflecting people’s sense of personal isolation, fragmentation, helplessness and dehumanization” (4).

43. Jarrell elsewhere calls himself “an old reader of science fiction”; he wrote to Mary, “Yesterday I was bored enough to buy not the good science fiction magazine, which I buy every month, but one of the bad ones” (KA 324; Letters 323–324).

44. For more on the “mass culture critique,” Dwight Macdonald, and the reception of the Frankfurt School in America, see Gorman, chapters 6 and 7, esp. 178–192. On “theories of mass culture as social decay,” see Brantlinger, esp. p. 17ff.; another influential treatment is Huyssen, chapters 1–3. Debaters shared not just positions but key texts; readers of Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White’s 1957 anthology, Mass Culture, will find, for example, the Frankfurt School thinker Leo Löwenthal quoting the very same paragraph of Tocqueville Jarrell adduced in “The Intellectual in America” (MC 51; SH 8–9). Similar debates took place slightly earlier in Britain: a powerful response to these is Raymond Williams, esp. 300–319.

45. The only substantial analyses of these notebooks, as of Sad Heart in general, are Richard Flynn’s: he argues that Jarrell’s critique of “Eisenhower’s America” contributes to the poems in The Lost World. See “Fairy” 5–6.

1. Zaretsky adds that by World War II, American “analysis had become … a complex phenomenon, encompassing a profession, an evolving body of theory, and a vast process of cultural diffusion in which analytic ideas influenced both popular culture and lay intellectuals” (“Charisma” 331). Ellen Herman has shown how mid-century psychologists and analysts shaped public policy; see her chapters 3, 4, and 5.

2. The notes are undated; their presence at Greensboro (rather than the Berg Collection), and their handwriting, suggests the early or mid-fifties. Jarrell worked for years on an essay called “T. S. Eliot and Obsessional Neurosis.” His extensive notes for that essay cite not only Freud and his peers but a bevy of articles from professional journals such as Psychoanalytic Quarterly. All that survives of the essay in his published work are a few sentences from “Fifty Years of American Poetry” (1962) in which Jarrell declares Eliot “from a psychoanalytical point of view … far and away the most interesting poet of [the twentieth] century” (Third 314).

3. Among the valuable psychoanalytic readings of Jarrell’s life and character, Hammer, Lesser, Longenbach, and Williamson focus on gender, Travisano (Mid-Century, chapter 3) and Vendler (“The Inconsolable”) on childhood. Vendler remarks that Freudian frameworks gave Jarrell the only “theory” he ever relied on—“a theory of life and not a theory of art” (Part 117–118).

4. For another view of the value Jarrell placed on “the unconscious,” see Mazzaro, 83–85.

5. For Ian Sansom, “it was undoubtedly Auden who for various reasons felt the full force of Jarrell’s subcontrary Oedipal urges” (280).

6. The same lecture incorporates Jarrell’s published, very negative, 1947 review of The Age of Anxiety; see KA 145–146, and (for comments on it) Keith Monroe, CE 256, and Sansom generally.

7. For a long discussion of this theme in Jarrell’s early poetry, see Flynn, Lost 17–21, and Hagenbuchle generally; see also my discussion of “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” below.

8. For more remarks on this long, disturbing, unwieldy, and sometimes beautiful poem, see Kinzie 70–72 and Flynn, Lost 30–31.

9. These poems and parts of poems, with their “womb-tomb asociation,” drive Helen Hagenbuchle’s 1975 monograph, The Black Goddess: for Hagenbuchle Jarrell’s work imagines an all-engulfing Jungian “Great Mother” who gives the poet “the choice either to submit to her fatal will or to fight against her in ultimately futile rebellion” (5). Though Jarrell certainly read Jung, there is no reason to think he found Jung’s theories especially congenial; Mary Jarrell remembers a Washington, D.C., psychoanalyst as “too Jungian for close friendship” with Randall, and Hagenbuchle bases her arguments not on Jarrell’s conscious choice among psychoanalytic models but on what she takes to be the general truth of Jung’s theories (Remembering 33).

10. Williamson finds this dynamic of preoedipal splitting at work also in Jarrell’s personal life, in which he seems to have been, at times, quite aloof and at other times very needy (“Märchen” 290–291). Joseph Smith remarks appositely that “persons with the greatest difficulty” in moving past preoedipal splitting and idealization “have at least a chance for achieving the deepest understanding” (113).

11. Jarrell told Sister Bernetta Quinn, “when I have a Selected Poems with notes I believe I will quote a little sentence from a psychoanalyst like [Harry Stack] Sullivan about Good Me, Bad Me, and the Other” (the characters the child in the poem creates) (Letters 304). Jarrell’s actual note in the 1955 Selected mentioned good me and bad me but quoted nobody (CP 6). Parker Tyler wrote in the Kenyon Review in 1952 that “A Quilt-Pattern” “verifies, to a spectacular degree, many insights of Freud, while emerging ‘unbroken’ in its own intuition and formal achievement” (CE 143).

12. Suzanne Ferguson gives the publication history: see Poetry 198.

13. For another appreciation of “A Hunt,” see Bottoms 93–94.

14. For Köhler’s version of object-relations, see 86–88; for models of mind-body or body-“self” dualism, see 181–194; on memory traces and the diachronic self, see 233–248 and 378–381.

15. Dream lyric is a recognized Renaissance subgenre, sometimes flagged, as in Milton’s sonnet 23, by the opening “Methought”: see Cook 235–247. During the 1920s, Claudia Morrison writes, “The central … concern to literary critics interested in the potential use of psychoanalytic theory was the nature of the relationship between art and the dream” (96).

16. For a very sophisticated discussion of analogies between literary works and dreams, see Skura, chapter 4, which focuses, however, almost entirely on short stories, novels, and plays. Frederick Hoffman’s 1945 study also covers modernist uses of Freud.

17. Other critics have noticed Jarrell’s attraction to boundary states, including the hypnopompic and hypnogogic: see Beck, Worlds 54, and Kinzie, Lesser, and Quinn, discussed below. Frances Ferguson identifies Jarrell’s interest in dream boundaries with a putative taking-apart of identity into a “choric voice”: see CE 170–174. Travisano also links the dreams or dreamlike delusions in “Ball Turret Gunner,” “Next Day,” and “Seele in Raum” (Mid-Century 62).

18. A poem which uses (a) dream as (a) metaphor (especially as a metaphor for itself) incorporates dream as trope; a poem organized as dreams are (supposedly) organized uses dream as scheme. See Hollander, Melodious chapter 1, esp. 5–6.

19. Quinn wrote frequently on Jarrell and dreams; see especially RJ 139–154. For a long reading of another dream poem, “In the Ward: The Sacred Wood,” see Suzanne Ferguson, Poetry 97–103.

20. The best recent take on the poem is probably Travisano’s: see Mid-Century 62, 240–243. For other readings not cited in text, see Frances Ferguson, CE 169; Richard Fein, CE 155–158; and several brief essays in Field 35 (1986) (part of that journal’s symposium on Jarrell).

21. Freud suggests in several places “that the act of birth is the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety” 16:397). Though he repudiated Otto Rank’s “extreme inferences,” Freud continued to believe in the thirties “that the experience of anxiety at birth is the model of all later situations of danger” (22:88).

22. For Williamson, the five-line poem “may have succeeded so well as an elegy on the indifference of war precisely because it is really an elegy for the primal separation” (“Märchen” 285).

23. For a relevant account of “strangeness,” in dreams and in accounts of them, see Hejinian, esp. 33. See also Mary Jarrell, Remembering 112.

24. For more on time in this poem, see Frances Ferguson, CE 169 (“The poem so thoroughly manifests the lack of a middle … in the life and in the brevity of the poetry … that the time between birth and death is lost”); for more on time in dreams, see Hejinian 35.

25. The elaborate structure (four couplets, each beginning with four or five feet and ending with two) recalls the stanzaic mechanics of Wilfred Owen and especially the five-line units of “The Send-Off,” which Jarrell had admired in his review of Owen (KA 169).

26. Suzanne Ferguson concludes that “The Black Swan” has no specific folk- or fairy-tale source (Poetry 125). Quinn links it to the ballet “Swan Lake” (RJ 146).

27. For more about “The Black Swan,” Freud, and dreaming, see Beck, Worlds 53–54; Bottoms 92–93; Kinzie 82–84; and Quinn, RJ 146–147.

28. For more on “Field and Forest,” see Ferguson, Poetry 201–202.

29. Decades earlier, Köhler had worried about specialization in similar terms; he wrote: “All the professors have their little farms which they are highly skilled in cultivating.… But every one of them has been careful to erect a fence against that vast, uncharted country beyond his farm in which we others try to find our way and cannot” (4).

30. The original (translated) Freud can be found in “A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams” (14:222).

31. This is also Travisano’s position; see Mid-Century 108–109. His readings, more biographical than mine, rely primarily on Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child. Travisano does mention Winnicott with reference to Jarrell’s array of “sacred objects,” photographs, and reproductions of paintings, which he installed in each of his houses and offices: these “‘transitional objects,’ as D. W. Winnicott terms them, allowed Jarrell to recreate his identity, surrounded by his ‘chosen family,’ no matter where he happened to be” (Mid-Century 109).

32. One of several possible sources in Freud is “Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psychoanalysis”: there psychoanalytic technique “consists simply in not directing one’s notice to anything in particular and in maintaining the same ‘evenly-suspended attention’ (as I have called it) in the face of all that one hears” (12:111–112).

33. Explaining how many thinkers in the twenties compared literary work to dreaming, Morrison adds that the comparison between literature and the process of analysis was much less common: Floyd Dell, who wrote preeminently about novelists (and who brought in Marx as well as Freud) seems almost alone in arguing that “the artist … is the psychoanalyst of human society” (quoted in Morrison 137).

34. For more on “A Game at Salzburg” see Longenbach 59–60 (stressing its postwar feel) and Suzanne Ferguson, Poetry 132.

35. Jarrell’s note to “A Game” tells us: “It seemed to me that if there could be a conversation between the world and God, this would be it” (CP 6). Readers of Freud will associate it with the fort-da game, too.

36. Freud claimed in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality that “the riddle of where babies come from … in a distorted form which can easily be rectified, is the same riddle that was propounded by the Theban Sphinx” (7:195).

37. For an appreciation of “Jerome” that draws on deconstruction and on psychoanalysis, see Frances Ferguson, CE 170ff. For one built around Saint Jerome in visual art, see Quinn, Randall Jarrell 76–79. Another brief, attentive reading is Bryant 147–151.

38. Sansom traces the toads to Chamfort, via Zola and Auden’s “New Year Letter” (283).

39. Suzanne Ferguson notes that “in some fairly developed drafts of the poem, Jarrell included … an allusion to the psychiatrist’s own analysis many years before, the traditional analysis all classical Freudian analysts undergo to prepare themselves for practice” (Poetry 171).

40. For more angels in Jarrell, see Quinn, “Randall Jarrell and Angels.”

41. Jarrell invoked Saint Jerome’s lion in a 1953 review: there the “quieter personal and domestic values,” “what St. Jerome felt for his lion instead of what he felt for his church—hardly exist for [André] Malraux; his mind is large and public” (KA 184). Richard Flynn’s reading of “Jerome” is precisely the reverse of mine: for him it is a condemnation of secular modernity, where “the possibility of adoration has vanished under the light of reason,” which leads society to “self-destruction” (Lost 92).

42. Mary Jarrell relates one of many stories about Randall’s investment in Kitten: “Once at a cocktail party on a campus we were visiting, a professor began drawing Randall out on Kitten. Delighted to escape from General Conversation, Randall was animated and voluble and a circle soon formed. At this point, to be funny perhaps, the professor interjected a story he’d heard about Randall giving his meat-ration coupons to the cat during the war. ‘Why of course!’ Randall flashed sparks. ‘What would you expect? He’s only a poor cat, and has to eat what he can. People can eat anything. What an absurd remark’” (Remembering 139). For more on Kitten, see Letters passim. Kitten died in the spring of 1956, “hit at the side of the road by a car” (Letters 414; Remembering 139).

43. Rogers also argues that twentieth-century writers have been more likely than their predecessors both to present “cat-human relationships … as friendships between equals” and to make them represent “enviable liberation” (129, 141). For Czeslaw Milosz, human affection for cats even refutes all “arguments that there is no human nature” (161).

44. Eve Sedgwick, perhaps recalling Jarrell, imagines telling her therapist “I need you to change me”; “The space of [her therapist] is both myself and not. / The place where talking / to someone else is also / talking to myself” (Dialogue 51, 115). For Sedgwick on Jarrell, see Fat Art, Thin Art 21.

45. Jarrell wrote later that the poem was divided up into “color and colorlessness” (KA 323).

46. In Bollas’s theories, “transformational object-seeking” is always a more specific quest to “recurrently enact a pre-verbal ego memory” of maternal care (16).

47. The Woman at the Washington Zoo came out in 1960, but most of the poems in it had been written years earlier; The Seven-League Crutches (1951) coincided with Lowell’s The Mills of the Kavanaughs. (Travisano argues that some of Jarrell’s dream poems from that volume react to Lowell’s.) For Jarrell’s private approval of Life Studies, see Letters 443, 457–459; for his only public comments on Lowell’s fifties work, see Third 332–334.

48. Charles Altieri now dislikes Life Studies for more or less this reason: see Postmodemisms 94.

49. For another discussion of these lines and their relations to Lowell, see Longenbach 57–58.

50. Vendler has suggested that Berryman’s Dream Songs owe something as a sequence, to “the successivity … of therapeutic interviews”; but, as Vendler also shows, Berryman’s protagonist, “the shamefully-acting self of his mad or alcoholic moments,” has very deliberately not integrated itself with any other kind of identity nor fully acknowledged its dependence on others (Given 32).

51. Trilling found Freud’s emphasis on the drives a welcome defense against “the social,” since such inherited motivations (however irrational or amoral) are aspects of humanity no cultural engineering can erase: “somewhere in this child, somewhere in the adult, there is a hard, irreducible, stubborn core of biological urgency, and biological necessity, and biological reason, which culture cannot reach, and which reserves the right, which sooner or later it will exercise, to judge the culture and resist and revise it” (54).

52. Such a reading makes up one strand of Vereen Bell’s Robert Lowell: Nihilist as Hero.

53. One such disappointed reader is Vendler, who noted in 1969 the love poems’ lack of sex and described in 1990 the poems’ “passivity” as against the essays’ “ferocity.” Michael Hofmann and Michael Wood, among more recent reviewers, also wish the poems were more aggressive.

54. These are not—if it needs saying—new ideas: see Freud’s own “Observations on Transference Love” (1915).

55. The poem also responds to Adrienne Rich’s “The Roof-walker”; see Letters 469.

1. For more on “The Elementary Scene,” see Pritchard 37–38 and Quinn, CE 203–204.

2. For more references to Proust, see the numerous invocations in Letters, as well as the poem “A Man Meets a Woman in the Street,” where “Proust, dying, is swallowing his iced beer /And changing in proof the death of Bergotte /According to his own experience” (CP 352).

3. The poem carries an epigraph from Der Rosenkavalier: “Die alte Frau, die alte Marschallin!” Hofmannsthal’s Marschallin anticipates looking in a mirror someday and seeing that she has grown old; the poem’s speaker might be an older Marschallin or might be anyone who knows the opera. Beck ties “The Face” specifically to the Rilke translation “Faded,” which Jarrell probably completed in 1952 (CE 197–198; CP 480).

4. For Ransom, the poem encapsulated “the tragedy of Everywoman”: what would he have said had he known that earlier drafts made the speaker “not handsome?” (RJ 173). On these and other issues of gender in “The Face,” see Longenbach 55. Benfey finds in “The Face” both male narcissism and a defense of male privilege, since the poem depicts a woman who wants other people to look at her (125–126). For a response to Benfey, see chapter 1. The best general discussion of “The Face” is Lesser 12; another is Suzanne Ferguson, Poetry 116–117.

5. Published in the Kenyon Review in 1946, the poem was omitted from subsequent volume of verse until Jarrell placed it, with very minor changes, in his 1960 The Woman at the Washington Zoo. Some brief readings of “A Ghost, A Real Ghost” are Bryant 145–146 and Kinzie 84; Suzanne Ferguson dismisses its “monotonous flatness” (Poetry 185). Flynn notes the resemblance between the speaker of “A Ghost,” the man in “Windows,” and the disembodied adult in “The Elementary Scene” (Lost 82).

6. Proust writes also: “For to ‘recognize’ someone and, a fortiori, to learn someone’s identity after having failed to recognize him, is to predicate two contradictory things of a single subject, it is to admit that what was here, the person whom one remembers no longer exists, and also that what is now here is a person whom one did not know to exist; and to do this we have to apprehend a mystery almost as disturbing as that of death, of which it is, indeed, as it were the preface and harbinger” (3:982).

7. On military songs during World War II in general, see Fussell 262–267: “Bitterness is the general tone of these songs, together with disdain for civilian ignorance and pomposity” (264).

8. For more on “our sense of a past and our impressions of the rate of time’s passage,” see Friedman (2).

9. The Berg Collection holds an Audenesque early sestina beginning “Now night braids with her fingers”; Jarrell seems to have found a model for both in Auden’s sestina “We have brought you, they said, a map of the country,” included in The Orators. For “A Story” as “autobiography,” see Letters 66; for other comments on the poem, see Ferguson, Poetry 12–13; Flynn, Lost 26–27; and Mazzaro, CE 91.

10. Few critics give the poem more than a couple of sentences; exceptions are Chappell, “Moving,” and Flynn, Lost 39–40.

11. See Winnicott 1–6. Another paper of Winnicott’s relevant to “Moving” is “The Place Where We Live” (104–110).

1. For more reactions to his apparent childlikeness, see Travisano, Mid-Century chapter 3.

2. Most notoriously, Joseph Bennett attacked Jarrell’s “doddering infantilism.” For discussions of that 1965 review and Jarrell’s reaction, see Pritchard 299 and Longenbach 63.

3. Jarrell’s other versions of Rilke’s poems about childhood include “The Grown-Up,” “The Child,” and “Requiem for the Death of a Boy,” all in The Woman at the Washington Zoo. On Jarrell’s translations and Rilke’s originals, see Seidler and Cross, CE 300–301 and 315–317.

4. Gertrude, unsurprisingly, feels very differently about Derek: she “couldn’t understand why [children] didn’t act more like grown-ups—a little more like, anyway; it seemed to her almost affectation on their part” (193).

5. The minor character Camille Batterson enters Jarrell’s novel to chasten our admiration of “potential”: “One can hardly help being primitively attracted to the Romantic belief that potentiality is always better than actuality, that nothing is always better than Anything; yet, looking at Miss Batterson, one could not help doubting it” (92).

6. On Sara Starr as the model for Constance, see Flynn, “Jarrell’s Wicked Fairy” 7–8.

7. Gottfried Rosenbaum had also wished for “some people to come from another planet and make me their pet” (Pictures 152).

8. For other comments on “A Sick Child,” see Pritchard 247 and Flynn, Lost 50–51.

9. For Sandra Beckett, “Crosswriting is a characteristic feature of the children’s classics that constitute the core of the children’s literature canon”: it therefore differentiates them from the age-graded books Jarrell dislikes, which denies that grownups and children have something (inner) in common (xii). On Jarrell’s children’s books, cross-writing, and mid-century literary theory, see also Travisano, “Dialectic” 26–28.

10. For more such readings, see Finney, CE 289, Griswold 53–61, and Pritchard 280–282.

11. For a willfully optimistic reading of the book as a parable of family—analogous to the later The Animal Family—see Flynn, Lost 105–107. For other readings of The Bat-Poet, see Bryant 122–124 and Quinn, Randall Jarrell 94–100.

12. After one face-to-face meeting with Frost, Jarrell told Lowell that Frost “felt faintly, comfortably, mocking about everything in me that hadn’t written those articles [on Frost’s poetry]: after all, nothing I did was the way he’d have done it” (Letters 483). For the mockingbird as Frost, see Pritchard 282, Griswold 56 (“The resemblance … is unmistakable”), and Mary Jarrell, Remembering 105 (seeing also a resemblance to Robert Lowell). Quinn thinks the mockingbird represents Ezra Pound; see her Randall Jarrell 100.

13. So traditional, in fact, as to have prompted the title of A. D. Nuttall’s Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

14. Most accounts trace the rise of American interest in adolescence to the psychologist G. Stanley Hall; see Spacks, chapter 9.

15. Many commentators have noticed how young Jarrell’s soldiers seem: Alex Vardamis’s work on his airmen, typically, describes their “ingenuousness,” “innocence,” and “childlike faith” (66). Vendler praises the “adolescent soldiers” of “Losses, “with their pitiful reality of high school—high school!—as the only notching stick of experience” (Part 112).

16. The full quotation from Plautus (Asinaria 495) reads Lupus est homo homini, non homo, quom qualis sit non novit: “Man is a wolf to man, when he hasn’t discovered what he’s like”; the familiar truncated “Man is a wolf to man” appears in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1.1.1).

17. For more on “Eighth Air Force,” see Brooks and Flynn (discussed in text) and also Ferguson, Poetry 85–88; Fein, CE 158–162; Quinn, Randall Jarrell 45–47; Bryant 51; and Vardamis 76–81.

18. Every critic who addresses the passage glosses the New Testament allusions differently (though most stress the soldiers’ innocence). For Richard Fein, “This is a poem of forgiveness for man as murderer, and forgiveness remakes the image of man”; for Sister Bernetta Quinn, “it is an elegy for, and at the same time an exoneration of, all the American combatants” (161; Randall Jarrell 46). But for Flynn, “the pilot who speaks the poem does not absolve himself of guilt; if he cannot find fault in the ‘other murderers,’ it is primarily because he recognizes that he, too, is not without sin” (Lost 35).

19. The comment occurs in Jarrell’s 1945 discussion of Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio. The whole passage has some bearing on Jarrell’s poem: “Why on Earth should Auden choose to represent Herod as the typical Liberal? It would have been far more natural and far more plausible to pick Pontius Pilate (at that time the only regular subscriber to The Nation in all Palestine); but Auden could not risk the sympathy for Pilate which, increasingly injected into the Gospels as they developed—as anti-Semitic propaganda, incidentally—has been inherited by all of us” (Third 161).

20. Suzanne Ferguson also finds Pyle relevant to “Eighth Air Force”: see Poetry 86.

21. Quinn’s formally attentive reading also connects Jarrell’s poem to Lowell’s conscientious objection: see her Randall Jarrell 46–47. For Lowell’s letter, objecting to “an almost apocalyptic series of all-out air raids” on German cities, see Hamilton 87–88. On his jail time, see Hamilton 92–100.

22. Pritchard considers “Aging” a good test of Jarrell’s achievement, filled as it is with “provocations to the charge of sentimentality” (255).

23. For Travisano’s comments on all three memorial sonnets, see Mid-Century 279–281.

24. For the 1957 Phillipe Halsman photo of Jarrell behind the wheel, see the last of the photos inserted in RJ and the book jacket for No Other Book; for a 1954 photo of the Jarrell family driving, see the photo insert in Pritchard. One of Jarrell’s most enthusiastic occasional essays is a paean to auto racing (KA 197–200).

25. The entire paragraph from Yeats’s “Reveries Over Childhood and Youth” is relevant: Yeats wrote, “For some months now I have lived with my own youth and childhood, not always writing indeed but thinking of it almost every day, and I am sorrowful and disturbed. It is not that I have accomplished too few of my plans, for I am not ambitious; but when I think of all the books I have read, and of the wise words I have heard spoken, and of the anxiety I have given to parents and grandparents, and of the hopes that I have had, all life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens” (70). Jarrell quoted the autobiographies in “The Development of Yeats’ Sense of Reality” (1942) (KA 89).

26. Stressing continuities between children’s and grownups’ reading, Jarrell differs sharply from almost all other fifties writers who attack mass culture. Dwight Macdonald, for example, complained in 1953 of “adultized children and infantile adults” and of a “merging of the child and grown-up audience” (MC 66). Leo Löwenthal sought “to know whether the consummation of popular culture really presupposes a human being with preadult traits or whether modern man has a split personality: half multilated child and half standardized adult” (MC 57). Such generalizations provided rhetorical ammunition for highbrow proponents of popular culture: Leslie Fiedler called himself, in 1955, one of the few intellectuals “who can boast that he has read more comic books than attacks on comic books” (MC 537).

27. Riesman’s explanation is worth consulting: art “objects are hardly given meaning in private and personal values when they are so heavily used as counters in a preferential method of relating oneself to [one’s] peers” (Lonely 77).

28. In his introduction to The Vanishing Adolescent, Riesman wrote of the “morally and culturally impoverished young whose basic passivity makes heroic demands on those who must daily cope with them in or out of school” (9). Jarrell seems to have felt the same way about some of his pupils at the Woman’s College, where he began teaching in 1947; he wrote to Hannah Arendt that though some of his students were bright, “the only thing to do with the freshmen here is to write a ballet with a Chorus of Peasant Girls for them” (Letters 180).

29. It represents Jarrell in the Norton Anthology of Poetry, third ed. (1983), where the only other Jarrell poems are “Ball Turret Gunner” and “Well Water.” (More recent Norton anthologies make different choices.) Quinn, too, compares the poem to “The Rape of the Lock:”: see Randall Jarrell 66. More recently Pritchard has praised the poem at length (193–198).

30. Sandra Brown encountered the poem as a student at Greensboro during the 1950s; her surprising essay offers just that critique: “[When] I took copies of ‘A Girl in a Library’ to my class … I wanted to know … if they identified with being peasants the way I once did” (153).

31. For more on “A Girl in a Library,” see Ferguson Poetry 136–140, Quinn, Randall Jarrell 63–67, Lesser 11 (finding in the poem’s mixed feelings a “self-lacerating despair”), and Chappell, “Indivisible” 12–13.

32. I quote Walter Arndt’s translation, published by Dutton in 1963, eleven years after Jarrell’s poem. Arndt taught in Greensboro—at the Women’s College and at Guilford College—during the early fifties, leaving only in 1956. Quinn suggests that Arndt’s presence in Greensboro drew Jarrell’s attention to Pushkin (Randall Jarrell 65).

33. Jarrell glossed these lines for Quinn: “many people have, like dolphins, leaped up for a moment, from the world of what Leibnitz [sic] calls ‘brute and geometrical necessity,’ up into the purer world of—oh, art, mysticism, philosophy, love; but the poor girl sleeps placidly in the trap, and has never even felt the need to escape” (Letters 239).

34. A 1941 essay compares homosexuality in the early Auden to “Greek homosexuality in Naomi Mitchison”; the king of Sparta and his lover are important characters in The Corn King (Third 127).

35. Flynn notes that its situation reflects Jarrell’s own youth with the sexes reversed: “rather than a little boy living with his mother and without his father, the fourteen-year-old girl in the poem lives with her father, and her mother is dead” (Lost 57). Beck sees the poet both in the girl who speaks and in the sick boy who occasionally responds: “The sick boy and the unlovely, unloved woman are, after all, Jarrell’s favorite self-projections; and in ‘The Night Before the Night Before Christmas’ he uses both” (Worlds 85). For more on “The Night Before,” see Flynn, Kinzie, Longenbach, and Travisano (discussed in text and in notes 37–39 below), and also Quinn, CE 68–71 (on dreams), Ferguson, Poetry 143–148, and Bryant 25–27.

36. Slogans play a similar role in “The Times Worsen,” which ends: “Life is that ‘wine like Mother used to make—/ So rich you can almost cut it with a knife’” (Age 20).

37. Longenbach writes that “the girl’s mind wanders between the ‘real’ world [her] books describe and a dream-world populated by her mother and pet squirrel, both of whom have recently died” (61). This “dream world” is itself helped into being by her books; her psyche is divided not so much between the real and the fantastic, or between the dead and the living (which her dream merges), but among the modes of representation she knows.

38. Some critics find this poem closer to Christian doctrine than I do. Travisano focuses on its angels: “the child feels a transitory yet powerful impulse to perceive at work the hand of a God whose existence she believes, intellectually, that she must deny” (Mid-Century 143–144). For more on Jarrell’s angels, see Quinn, “Angels.”

39. Kinzie has aptly described “the long emotional crescendo of the last five pages of the poem,” which lead readers “not just to a sympathy with the essential being of the girl—her knowledge that her brother is dying, that she and he are suspended in an ambiguous universe together, and that she cannot help any of it—but to a manifestation of Jarrell’s victory over his own limitations” (82).

40. Richard Eberhart remembered that James Laughlin of New Directions sent him the Pisan Cantos manuscript for review in fall 1946. At the time, Jarrell was living in New York City and editing the book review pages at The Nation; he would probably have seen the manuscript as soon as Laughlin circulated it (Homberger 375).

41. I count Jarrell’s very long, very early “Orestes at Tauris” as apprentice work; so did he (CP 3, 406).

42. Jarrell wrote: “probably the best poem by a living poet, Four Quartets, has only one real character, the poet, and a recurrent state of that character which we are assured is God; even the ghostly mentor encountered after the air-raid is half Eliot himself, a sort of Dostoievsky double” (Age 241).

1. Among recent discussions of Jarrell and gender, Hammer and Longenbach have considered his literary-historical motives for writing in the voices of women and girls, while Benfey and (more convincingly) Williamson offer psychoanalytic readings; Benfey, Lesser, and others decide that Jarrell’s women sound too much like men or too much like him. For more on these arguments, see especially Hammer, “Who” 392, 401–405.

2. Thus the speakers in “Seele im Raum” and “Next Day” are not just women but also aging housewives. The girl of “The Night Before.” is an American adolescent girl, a young reader, and a thirties reader to boot.

3. Jarrell has taken his Freudian quotation from the Standard Edition’s English version of Freud’s “Some Psychic Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes” (19:257) For Chodorow’s comments on the same passage, see Mothering, chapters 9 and 10, esp. 166ff: “feminine development … may lead to a superego more open to persuasion and the judgments of others, that is, not so independent of its emotional origins” (169).

4. For Jarrell’s role in the writing of A Wilderness of Ladies, see Eleanor Ross Taylor’s own account (“Altogether we had three sessions going over my poems”) and also Mary’s (RJ 239, Remembering 71).

5. Experts, Benjamin has written, “have only just begun to think about the mother as a subject in her own right, principally because … contemporary feminism … made us aware of the disastrous results for women of being reduced to the mere extension of a two-month-old” (Bonds 23). She describes one “mother who, when asked what care and support mothers need, could not understand the question and finally replied, ‘Someone taking care of me? … I’m the mother, I’m the one, I take care of him!’” (Bonds 214; italics hers).

6. For more of Mary’s comments on “The Lost Children,” see Remembering 122–128. The poem may also, as Suzanne Ferguson suggests, owe something to Kipling’s story “‘They’”: see Poetry 210–212. For more on “The Lost Children,” see Bryant 163–165, Lesser 11, and Pritchard 303–304.

7. For more on “Windows,” see Bryant 136–137, Flynn, Lost 81–84, Hagenbuchle 77–78, and Pritchard 259–262. For the probable original of the snowstorm in “Windows,” see Letters 338.

8. Drafts of the poem sharpen the sense of reunion with the mother: they have its speaker “look up, nodding, into a kind of love, /A speechess face, and there for me forever” (UNC-Greensboro).

9. See, for example, Brantlinger, Huyssen (esp. chapters 1 and 3), Pitkin, Rogin, and Zaretsky, “Charisma”; see also the last section of my chapter 2.

10. On Fly-by-Night considered as a whole book, with emphases on its Freudian overtones, see Griswold 74–94 and Flynn, Lost 105–107; for another appreciative reading, see Getz.

11. In Flynn’s summary, the husband “replicates his own unstable childhood in his marriage.… In his feeling that he has, perhaps, married his mother, he feels that he has become his father by incorporating his father’s worst characteristics” (Lost 120–121). Ferguson is the only other critic to discuss “Hope” in more than biographical terms: see Poetry 205–210.

12. For antimaternal sentiments in forties and fifties popular culture, see Rogin, chapter 8; a flagrant example is Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers, whose dangerous “Momism,” Rogin comments, “is the demonic version of domestic ideology” (241).

13. For the psychoanalyst Joseph Smith, “the more persons protest that they are completely different from the mother the more they reveal a lack of separateness—a secret holding-on that betrays the fear of individuation” (116).

14. On the writing of The Animal Family, and on some of its sources, see Remembering 107–113.

15. The best and longest discussions of The Animal Family are Griswold’s and Flynn’s; see, respectively, Griswold 119–128 and Lost 109–115. For other comments, see Finney, CE 289–291; Quinn, Randall Jarrell 101–105; Pritchard, 313–315; and Williamson, “Märchen” 296–298.

16. Pritchard describes the plot, quite plausibly, as the successive fulfillment of the hunter’s wishes (314). Flynn writes, “it is apparent from the beginning that the hunter lacks more than an audience: what he misses, what makes his loneliness profound, is a family—not just a mother, as has been suggested, but a complete family, consisting of father and mother and child” (Lost 111).

17. Both Mary Jarrell and Griswold point out that the mermaid is perhaps the only mother figure in Jarrell’s oeuvre who has no hint of being a bad, archetypal Mother: see Remembering 109 and Griswold 120–122. Williamson ties this family’s happiness to “the fact that none of [them] have actually emerged from each other’s bodies” (“Märchen” 297).

18. The Lost World, the triptych, links up in many respects with the later poem “Thinking of the Lost World,” which ends the book also entitled The Lost World.

19. The poem does not, however, quote from the letters, which can be read at the Berg Collection; for discussions of the letters themselves, see Pritchard 16–17 and 288, and also Williamson 289–290.

20. Several critics have already examined the poem, or parts of it, at some length. Ferguson focuses on its nostalgic elements and on its debts to Proust (Poetry 212–221). Flynn’s book finds in the poem a happy child threatened by the approach of adolescent sexuality and also reads into it Jarrell’s hostility to fifties mass culture (Lost 121–134). For him, the triptych portrays a “childhood paradise … on the brink of its disapperance” in “awakening adolescence” (Lost 122). Flynn’s recent, more nuanced “Jarrell’s Wicked Fairy” finds thematic and verbal continuities between the prose of Sad Heart and the “Lost World” poems; see also his “Infant Sight” 114–115. Quinn and Travisano treat the poems as autobiographical record: see Randall Jarrell 24–25; Mid-Century 102–105. Pritchard offers a remarkable defense of the poems’ style: see 305–310. Bryant provides an admiring description: see 166–171. For remarks on the poem by Jarrell’s contemporaries, see Bishop, One Art 432–435 and RJ 55, 60–62, 266–271.

21. The title “Children’s Arms,” with its faint Virgilian echo, nods to Dante’s guide, Virgil; in general, though, Dantean allusions serve the poem as grace notes or sidebars—one cannot read the whole poem well through them.

22. Are these lines a source for Elizabeth Bishop’s “Crusoe in England”? After reading The Lost World, Bishop told Jarrell, in a letter he may never have read, “some of the Lost World hasn’t quite been lost here yet, I feel, on the days I still like living in this backward place.” For Bishop’s extensive comments on The Lost World (and on The Bat-Poet), see One Art 432–435. For the beginnings of “Crusoe” and their dates, see Millier 446–447.

23. The link between “habit” and “happiness” is one among several of Jarrell’s allusions to an epigram Pushkin borrowed from Chateaubriand and that Jarrell probably found in Pushkin: “Heaven gives us habits to take the place of happiness” (Onegin 2:31). For more “habit” and “happiness” in Jarrell’s late poetry, see “Aging,” “Well Water,” and “A Man Meets a Woman” (CP 234, 300, 351).

24. On this and other Proustian references in Jarrell, see Ferguson, Poetry 212–213.

25. Flynn writes: “The game of dominoes with the great-grandmother underscores the confusion of the child-speaker in his new role as adolescent. He sense that the roles of parent and child are curiously reversed, and, in a sense, feels guilty for wishing to remain a child, when he feels that what is expected of him is to become responsible like an adult” (Lost 127).

26. Compare Jarrell’s futile apology to Dandeen with Proust’s futile apology to his grandmother: “never should I be able to eradicate from my memory that contraction of her face, that anguish of her heart, or rather of mine; for as the dead exist only in us, it is ourselves that we strike without respite when we persist in recalling the blows that we have dealt them. I clung to this pain, cruel as it was, with all my strength, for I realised that it was the effect of the memory I had of my grandmother, the proof that this memory was indeed present within me” (2:786).

27. Poets of other generations also decided that to acquire selfhood was to imagine one’s death. James Merrill imagined that in the next world our spirits “appear to others” at “THE AGE /AT WHICH IT FIRST SEEMS CREDIBLE TO DIE” (16; capitals in original).

28. The only Life Studies poem to merge adult and child selves is “Grandparents,” whose climactic passage sounds as if Lowell had been learning from Jarrell: “Grandpa! Have me, hold me, cherish me! /Tears smut my fingers …” A few lines later Lowell decides that he is “disloyal still” (LS/FUD 69).

29. For much more on Mignonette’s song, see Steedman, Strange, chapter 1.

30. This is the effect Jarrell’s last poems seem to have had on Bishop, who read them as reminiscences not of childhood but of a historical period: she wrote Jarrell, apropos of “The Player Piano,” “Heavens, I remember the false armistice—but for some reason, not the real one” (One Art 433). Flynn notes that this blurring of Gay Nineties and Gay Twenties occurs to Jarrell first in the Sad Heart notebooks, where he complains that the younger generation seems to lack a historical sense (“Fairy” 12).

31. For Jarrell’s “nothing” as a version of Stevens’s “Snow Man” “nothing,” see Denis Donoghue, RJ 61, and also Longenbach 64; another reading is John Crowe Ransom’s (RJ 181).

1. The poets reviewed were Arnold Stein (later a well-known Milton scholar), Oscar Williams, Stanton Coblentz, and Ruth Pitter. For the reviews, see KA 137–139.

2. Such ambiguities may be one reason Grossman finds in Jarrell only “the trace of a great enterprise … a set of brilliant and, on the whole, evasive fragments” (33).

3. Jarrell is probably remembering Elizabeth Bishop’s “Songs for a Colored Singer”: “A washing hangs upon the line / But it’s not mine / None of the things that I can see / Belong to me” (Poems 47).

4. For much more about Frost’s influence on Jarrell, see the remarks throughout Pritchard, esp. 214–215.

5. Other relevant poems on visual art include the early “Dummies;” “The Knight, Death and the Devil”; parts of “The End of the Rainbow,” a poem I have only been able to touch on here; and “The Augsburg Adoration” (CP 21, 385, 219, 346). On “The Knight,” a good commentary is Hollander, Gazer’s 255–258; “Jarrell’s knight is in some ways more like a successful analysand than a soldier of the faith” (257).

6. For other discussions of “The Old and the New Masters,” see Sansom 285–287, Ferguson, Poetry 195–198, and Quinn, Randall Jarrell 79–86. The poem interacts with, and to some extent duplicates, Jarrell’s prose attack on abstract expressionism: see KA 285–289.

7. The poem’s consideration of “objectivity” recalls Köhler’s, twenty-five years earlier; he too brought in the analogy of painting while rebuking his fellow scientists for emphasizing the insignificance of “man”: “We do not evaluate paintings in terms of square inches, although we can measure them on this scale, and shall then find them practically non-entities in comparison with the Sahara. Thus man can be seen in a merely astronomical scheme of things; and, if he appears in this scheme as almost non-existent, a corresponding statement will be ‘correct.’ And yet, always in that same sense, such a statement will be altogether untrue” (20; italics in original).

8. Jarrell would have seen the sculpture during the summer of 1958, which he and Mary spent with the Taylors in Italy.

9. For other readings of “The Bronze David” see Bryant 151–153; Ferguson, Poetry 181–184; Flynn, Lost 95–97; Quinn, Randall Jarrell 68–71, and Williamson, Almost a Girl 24–26.

10. Compare Donald Davie’s description of Poundian style: “If he is sure that there is more to his subject (more perhaps to any subject) than he got out of it,” Davie writes, “then, like Michelangelo leaving some portion of stone unworked in his sculptures, the poet will deliberately seek an effect of improvisation. … For only in this way can he be true to his sense of the inexhaustibility of the human and non-human nature he is working with, a sense which makes him feel not noble but humble” (Ezra Pound 86–87).