The American Century: Literature since 1945 533As he presents it, war makes life more “real” – in the sense that it brings people closer
to the pressures of history and the physical acts of living and dying – and more
“unreal” – in that it cuts them off from everyday routine, propelling them into an
unfamiliar realm of potential nightmare. “The soldiers are all haunted by their lives,”
Jarrell remarks in one piece; and it is this feeling of moving through experience half-
asleep and half-awake, together with imagery of a monstrous birth, a fall in which
innocence is violated, that distinguishes his most famous war poem, “The Death of
the Ball Turret Gunner.”
The work of Randall Jarrell in fact indicates the direction in which American
poetry was to go within ten years of the end of the war: toward mythology, the use
of dream and archetype. His poems are, certainly, intimate and idiomatic. “What
can be more tedious,” he asked, “than a man whose every sentence is a balanced
epigram without wit, profundity and taste?” Particularly in his later pieces, where he
turns from a taut, often strained voice to a richly varied use of iambics, he manages
to capture the lively play of his speech and mind. In all his poems, however, and
especially the earlier ones, the lively texture is complicated by the use of legends,
dreams, and fairy tale. “All this I dreamed in my great ragged bed ... / Or so
I dreamed,” he says in one piece; in another, he refers to a young girl reading in a
library as “An object among dreams.” Frequently, the dream convention or the
structure of fairy tale enables him to edge between the real and the surreal; soldiers
mingle with figures from the gospels in his work, ordinary people rub shoulders
with angels, devils, corn kings, or characters from the Brothers Grimm. “Behind
everything,” Jarrell insists, “There is always / The unknown unwanted life”; and his
extraordinary capacity for combining what he called “the plain / Flat object-language
of a child” with the vocabulary of dream registers this. The plain surfaces of a world
where, so often, “we miss our lives” and the “inconceivable enchantment” beneath:
they are both there, in the amphibious medium of his writing, recalling us constantly
to his own sense that “Living is more dangerous than anything.”
Writing in 1952, W. H. Auden commented on this interest in legends and
archetypes that seemed to characterize a new generation of poets. Auden’s remarks
were written as a preface to the first volume of W. S. Merwin’s (1927–) A Mask for
Janus (1952); and Merwin, at least in his earlier work, illustrates this mythologizing
tendency even more clearly than Jarrell. With Jarrell, the impulse toward the
legendary is tempered by his use of peculiarly fluent, even flat forms of speech and
his professed commitment to the lives and dreams of ordinary people, their losses,
their courage, and their longing for change. In the early poetry of Merwin, however,
the landscape is stylized and anonymous (there are, in fact, no reference to the
United States in the 1950s); the language is elevated and often archaic; and the tone
is distanced, hieratic. The opening of “Dictum: For a Masque of Deluge” is typical:
“There will be the cough before the silence, then / Expectation; and the hush of
portent / Must be welcomed by diffident music.” Exploiting traditional meters,
populated by archetypal figures and ancient myths, this is a poetry that absolutely
refuses any accommodation to the contemporary. Its subjects are the perennial onesGGray_c05.indd 533ray_c 05 .indd 533 8 8/1/2011 7:31:29 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 29 PM