dreaming and dying.’’ For Suzanne Ferguson, at
the end of the poem the flyer is starting to shake
off his inability to accept the reality of death. As
she points out inThe Poetry of Randall Jarrell,
‘‘The individual ‘I’ at last, not ‘we,’ dreams his
death, and at last accepts the deaths of the cities,
personified—abstractions still, but real.’’ How-
ever, Ferguson also notes that the flyer cannot
‘‘relate his death to any logical cause.’’ Ferguson
regards ‘‘Losses’’ as a not entirely successful
poem, ‘‘partly because it lapses into a generalized
rather than specific point of view, and partly
because the reader accepts only with difficulty
the naı ̈vety of the speaker(s).’’ William H. Pritch-
ard, however, has a more positive assessment
of the poem. He remarks inRandall Jarrell: A
Literary Life, ‘‘Avoiding the directly satiric as
well as the solemnity of didacticism, the poem
achieves freshness and surprise by its deadpan
juxtaposition of things that don’t, yet do, belong
together.’’
CRITICISMBryan Aubrey
Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English. In the following
essay, he explains how Jarrell’s wartime letters reveal
his attitudes about World War II and offer some clues
as to why his poem ‘‘Losses’’ took the form it did.
It was the war poems of Randall Jarrell that
solidified the poetic reputation he had started to
build in 1942 with his first collection,Blood for a
Stranger. His first collection of war poems,Little
Friend, Little Friend, which contained ‘‘Losses,’’
was published in 1945, during the last year
of World War II. A collection titledLossesfol-
lowed three years later. The poems were the result
of Jarrell’s thoughts about the war and his ability
to imagine himself into the experience of those
who had fought in it. Jarrell himself had not been
in combat and spent the entire war in the United
States. He had enlisted in the Army Air Forces in
October 1942 and trained as a pilot; he completed
about thirty hours of flying and on his failure
to make the grade (‘‘washing out’’ was the term
used) had trained as an instructor in a celestial
navigation tower. He moved to Tucson, Arizona,
in November 1943 and gave navigators at Davis-
Monthan field their last three months of training
before they entered combat in the new bombers,
the B-29 Superfortresses.
The B-29 first flew in September 1942 and
was first utilized in the war in 1944 in the air
attacks on Japanese cities. In fact, as the casualtyWHAT
DO I READ
NEXT?Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys
Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Ger-
manyby Donald L. Miller (2007) tells the
story of the U.S. Eighth Air Force, which
flew bombing missions over Germany from
1942 to 1945. Despite the title, Miller admits
that the Eighth had a mixed record of success,
suffering twenty-six thousand combat deaths.
He constructs his account from oral histories,
diaries, and government documents.
Jarrell’sPoetry and the Ageis a collection of
essays on literary topics. It was first published
in 1953 (and was reissued in 2001 with two
additional essays), when Jarrell was emerging
as one of the foremost literary critics of his
time. These essays show the range of his critical
interests, including Robert Frost, Wallace Ste-
vens, Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Wil-
liams. His style is clear and often witty, and his
essay ‘‘The Obscurity of the Poets,’’ is as fresh
and relevant today as it was fifty years ago.
American War Poetry: An Anthology(2006),
edited by Lorrie Goldensohn, covers war
poetry from the colonial period to the
twenty-first-century war in Iraq, including
every major conflict the United States has
been involved in. Nearly two hundred poets
are included, and their poems reveal a star-
tlingly wide range of attitudes toward war.
InBomber Pilot: A Memoir of World War II
(1978), Philip Ardery describes his war expe-
riences, beginning in flight school in 1940, and
covering his time spent as a flying instructor,
flying combat missions over Europe as a B-24
squadron commander, and later as an oper-
ations officer in the Eighth Air Force. It is a
vivid picture of five tumultuous years and
adds a great deal to the reader’s appreciation
of Jarrell’s ‘‘Losses.’’Losses