can create poetry. I would be the last to deny that
learning, sensitivity, good taste, and understand-
ing of the tradition may assist poetic endeavor,
but these attainments, however they may lend
assistance, are surely not the first qualities that a
poet must possess. Emotional sensitivity, above
the rest, is the quality most overrated since the
time of the Romantics in England. Poetry
results, not from the conjuncture of an object
and a sensitive perception (which children enjoy
to a greater degree than adults), but from the
observation of an event, ‘‘internal’’ or ‘‘exter-
nal,’’ by a penetrating intelligence. And if that
event involves the operation of objective phe-
nomena, as it very often must, then those objec-
tive phenomena will assume central value for
the observing intelligence.
I suspect that Mr. Graham will set this down as
another argument for ‘‘realism,’’ which is the mala-
propism he has so blindly pinned to Mr. Jarrell’s
poetry. Of course, realism in its broadest meaning
must be adjunctive to all art: art depends on life. But
realism as a literary dogma has long since been cast
aside by serious artists. Mr. Jarrell, to select only
one example, has hardly been concerned with the
presentation of an accurate report of the war. The
world of war which he has created in his poetry is
one of which, I dare say, he, as a participating
soldier, was unaware. But working as a poet, he
has constructed a world, and it is a true one because
it is a logical metaphor spanning the desert of imag-
ination between reality and ideality.
Mr. Graham pays considerable attention in
his review to the notes which Mr. Jarrell appended
to the poems inLosses, and he seems to deprecate
author’s notes generally. Yet I think he would not
disagree with the modern editors of theDivine
Comedywho feel obliged to include in their notes
explanations of the medieval concept of celestial
and infernal geography. Such information is help-
ful and often entirely necessary for the under-
standing of poetry written about things of which
readers may be more or less ignorant. Mr. Gra-
ham seems to say that it is improper for poets to
write on subjects which readers do not know. But
many people enjoy reading theDivine Comedy
and the topical satires of Pope, Chaucer, or even
Juvenal, about which they know next to nothing
from personal experience. In our departmental-
ized world, where the experiences of life have
become less and less common to society, objective
understanding necessarily precedes imaginative
understanding. How can a poet today write of
war for a civilian audience unless he is willing to
describe the apparatus ofwarfare?Isapoettobe
denied the expression of a genuine experience
merely because it occurs whenheisseatedbefore
the view plate of a radar set?
It would appear, then, that at least one of the
criteria adopted by Mr. Graham is bound to inva-
lidate his criticism, and certainly this is so in his
review ofLosses. The book contains war poems
quite as good as any written in this century. ‘‘A
Camp in the Prussian Forest,’’‘‘Eighth Air Force,’’
‘‘Burning the Letters’’—these and others are
without question successful poems. Yet all of
them deal with the ‘‘incidental values’’ dispraised
by Mr. Graham. Part of their power accrues, in
fact, from their immanent recognition of the dehu-
manization of conflict and of the giant metal wills
which crash together in our robot warfare. How-
ever much ultimate motives derive from men, it
is the fictions and objects, not the human beings,
which get out of hand and cause the immediate,
disastrous damage; and since these forces lumber
through society with elephantine strength and
come together here and there in tropical bursts of
tumult, they can be treated validly by Mr. Jarrell as
real mythic movements against which our smaller
events may be cast. These same external forces act
behind the poems which are not about war:
‘‘Loss,’’‘‘Lady Bates,’’‘‘A Country Life.’’
I come around again to my starting point:
the subjects of poetry cannot be limited. Poetry
is good or bad in its methods, not in its materials.
The poetry written within the milieu recom-
mended by Mr. Graham is often exciting, and
it is unseemly of him to denounce other media
with partisan animosity. It seems to me that the
varieties of poetry in western literature which
can be read with plenary enjoyment by contem-
porary readers ought to convince Mr. Graham
that he is puffing quite preposterously on a dead
cigar. It is time for him and his dogmatic, paro-
chial colleagues to give over their idle wrath and
ask themselves why a poem is worth reading,
instead of why the poet sees different things
than they want him to see.
Source:Hayden Carruth, ‘‘Review ofLosses’’ inPoetry,
Vol. 72, No. 6, September 1948, pp. 307–11.Yvor Winters
In the following excerpt from a negative review of
‘‘Losses,’’ Winters asserts that Jarrell is ‘‘wholly
without the gift of language.’’Losses