The two marks by which we most readily
recognize a poet, I presume, are first an ability
to grasp and objectify a particular subject so that
it is rendered comprehensible both as an individ-
ual thing and as a symbol of general experience,
and second a command of the potentialities of
language, phrase by phrase, including the rhyth-
mic potentialities. Neither of these abilities will
ever develop very far by itself: the subject cannot
be defined satisfactorily in general unless it is
defined well in detail, and the language, phrase
by phrase, cannot be made to say much unless
the poet knows what he is trying to say. Never-
theless, the gift of language can sometimes carry
a poet a fair distance without much support from
thought: the poetry so achieved will always be in
a large measure unsatisfactory, but it may be
memorable at least in part. Swinburne is an
example, and so in somewhat different ways
are Collins and Mallarme ́.WhenVale ́ry writes
‘‘Masse de calme et visible re ́serve,’’ when Stevens
writes ‘‘Than mute bare splendors of the sun and
moon,’’ when Tate writes ‘‘So blind, in so severe a
place,’’ we know that we are in the presence of
living language and that if we master the whole
statement we may conceivably find ourselves in
the presence of great poetry. But without the gift
of language, the best subject in the world will fall
absolutely dead from the hand.
What I wish to point out, and I do it regret-
fully, is this: that Randall Jarrell is wholly without
the gift of language. With the best of intentions
and some reasonably good topics, he displays,
line by line, from beginning to end of his book,
an utter incapacity to state anything memorably;
and he frequently displays a distressing capacity
to make serious topics appear ludicrous. There is
not much one can do in a case like this except to
illustrate the defect. This is from ‘‘Pilots, Man
Your Planes’’:
The carrier meshed in its white whirling wake,
The gray ship sparkling from the blue-black
sea,
The little carrier—erupts in flak,
One hammering, hysterical, tremendous fire.
Flickering through flashes, the stained roll-
ing clouds,
The air jarred like water tilted in a bowl,
The red wriggling tracers—colonies
Whose instant life annexes the whole sky—
Hunt out the one end they have being for,
Are metamorphosed into one pure smear
Of flame, and dieIn the maniacal convulsive spin
Of the raider with a wing snapped off, the
plane
Trailing its flaming kite’s-tail to the wave.
If I had received this description, written out
as prose, from a student in freshman composi-
tion at Stanford, there is scarcely a phrase in it
which I should not have underlined as either trite
or clumsily obvious; furthermore, I think that
there is scarcely a teacher of freshman composi-
tion at Stanford (I should hesitate to speak for
the teachers in the great universities of the east)
who would not mark it similarly. The passage is
dead; furthermore, one will find nothing appre-
ciably better in Jarrell. Occasionally, however,
as he approaches the ludicrous, one may find
something worse. This is the last stanza of ‘‘The
Breath of Night’’:
Here too, though death is hushed, though
joy
Obscures, like night, their wars,
The beings of this world are swept
By the Strife that moves the stars.
This is the first stanza of another poem:
When I was home last Christmas
I called on your family,
Your aunts and your mother, your sister;
They were kind as ever to me.
These two stanzas (and there are many more
like them) are the sort of thing that one would
expect to see published by a female genius in a
country newspaper.
I realize, and in fairness should confess, that
the world is against me in this judgment. Among
the eminent critics who praise Jarrell in very high
terms on the jacket are Joseph Warren Beach,
Arthur Mizener, Dudley Fitts, Delmore Schwartz,
Alan Swallow, John Crowe Ransom, and Theo-
dore Spencer. The praises are similar in tenor; so I
shall quote only one, and the shortest, which is
Ransom’s: ‘‘He has an angel’s velocity and range
with language.’’
If one were inclined to use the critical techni-
que which Jarrell himself habitually employs, the
technique of explosive epigram and Mencken-
esque ridicule, I believe that one could, between
the poems and the comments on the jacket, write
a fairly entertaining essay. But it seems to me
more profitable to drop the subject....
Source:Yvor Winters, ‘‘Three Poets,’’ inHudson Review,
Vol. 1, No. 3, Autumn 1948, pp. 402–406.Losses