Poetry for Students, Volume 31

inability to rationalize morally what he has done
or to find an adequate language for it....

Source:Matthew B. Hill, ‘‘The Dream from Which No One
Wakes: Jarrell, Dreams, and War,’’ inWar, Literature & the
Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities, Vol. 19,
No. 1/2, 2007, pp. 152–64.

Charlotte H. Beck
In the following essay, Beck investigates Jarrell’s
use of four personae—soldiers, children, women,
and observers—and considers ‘‘Losses’’ in this
context.

Randall Jarrell once wrote, ‘‘We never step
twice in the same Auden.’’ His own readers
might ask, ‘‘Will therealRandall Jarrell please
stand up?’’ Searching the poems, M. L. Rosen-
thal finds that Jarrell’s typical speaker is ‘‘at once
himself or herselfandRandall Jarrell; not, of
course, Jarrell the wit, translator of Rilke and
edgily competitive poet, but the essential Jarrell’’
([‘‘Between Two Worlds’’] 31). The many Jarrells
are as difficult to classify as to define. Jerome
Mazzaro places him ‘‘between [the] two worlds’’
of modernism and postmodemism ([Randall Jar-
rell] 83), and Rosenthal praisesThe Lost World
as Jarrell’s vehicle of entry into a confessional
period wherein he ‘‘finally treats intimate real-
ities of his own actual life and memory’’ (41).
These efforts to postmodernize Randall Jarrell,
to prefer the confessional poet of The Lost
World, is to devalue much if not all that pre-
cedes, as well as much that is in that climactic
volume of poetry. It was the other Jarrell, the
reluctant heir of modernism, who created mono-
logues, dialogues, and scenes so central to his
achievement. This was the poet who discovered
and turned to his advantage one of modernism’s
chief strategies, ‘‘the sweet uses of personae.’’

I have adapted that phrase, ‘‘the sweet uses
of personae,’’ from Mary Jarrell’s article ‘‘Ideas
and Poems,’’ wherein she describes how for Ran-
dall Jarrell, ‘‘the idea of altering the gender of his
feelings’’ enabled him to avoid ‘‘the maudlin
effects of a man’s self-pitying confessions.’’ She
relates how first in ‘‘The Face’’ and afterwards
in ‘‘The Woman at the Washington Zoo’’ and
‘‘The End of the Rainbow,’’ he ‘‘established how
sweet the uses of the persona could be for him’’
(218–19). Not only with female personae, but
with a procession of soldiers, children, and an
assortment of other male speakers, Jarrell found
in the dramatic poem an effective distancing
strategy. The use of personae in well over half
of his poems places Randall Jarrell among the

modernists, whose poetic he alternately admired

and deplored but fully understood.

My intention is not to define such protean

termsas‘‘modern’’and‘‘postmodern’’ except inso-

far as they imply a judgmental contrast between

Jarrell’s dramatic and his so-called ‘‘confessional’’

poems. Rather, I would argue that for Jarrell, the

use of many masks—of critic, novelist, children’s

storyteller, satirist, and translator, as well as all

those that appear in his poetry—was necessary to

his art and to his delineation of truth as he per-

ceived it. For Mazzaro, this ‘‘insist[ence] on dra-

matic monologues’’ as ‘‘onealternate to shaping his

views into a single voice’’ makes him a relativist,

evenamodernskeptic(87).Thesamechargecan,

of course, be leveled at Jarrell’s predecessors in the

genre—Browning, Tennyson, Frost, and Eliot, to

name a few—who, like Jarrell, saw reality as com-

posed of many differing perceptions coexisting in

one multifaceted world. For such poets, the dra-

matic monologue and related forms become the

waytoalloweachselfitsversionoftruth;and

relativism becomes theonly viable philosophy.

I

Does Jarrell’s use of the dramatic monologue

make him a modernist? To answer this question one

need only recall how he consistently, throughout his

career, defined modernism. In his 1942 essay, ‘‘The

End of the Line,’’ Jarrell anticipates modern critics’

efforts to merge modernism with romanticism by

labeling the former an ‘‘extension’’ and ‘‘end prod-

uct’’ of the latter. For the first time, also, Jarrell calls

thedramaticmonologueaformwhichbeganasa

‘‘departure from the norm of ordinary poetry’’ but

which ‘‘in modernist poetry... itself becomes the

norm’’ (79). And although he proceeds to pro-

nounce modernism’s death, thereby separating

himself and his generation from a spent tradition,

Jarrell gives to modernist poetry thirteen

FOR SUCH POETS, THE DRAMATIC

MONOLOGUE AND RELATED FORMS BECOME THE

WAY TO ALLOW EACH SELF ITS VERSION OF TRUTH;

AND RELATIVISM BECOMES THE ONLY VIABLE

PHILOSOPHY.’’

Losses