characteristics—including experimentalism;
heightened emotional intensity to the point of
violence; obscurity and inaccessibility; lack of
restraint; emphasis on detail; preoccupation
with the unconscious, with dreams; irony of
every type; primitivism;isolationism; and con-
demnation of the present for an idealized past
(79)—all of which, with the possible exception of
primitivism, might be used to describe Jarrell’s
own poetry. For Randall Jarrell, both modern
poetry and its most characteristic form, the dra-
matic monologue, had become a cliche ́which had
yet to be replaced by any major kind of innova-
tion. In a sense, then, to follow in the modern
tradition was for Jarrell and his generation a
compromise and a delaying strategy.
Jarrell’s critics have often mirrored his ambiv-
alence toward the dramatic mode by asking, with
Frances Ferguson, ‘‘Why did he have so many
‘characters’ populating his poems’’ ([‘‘Randall Jar-
rell and the Flotations of Voice’’] 163)? Others
have objected, along with James Dickey, to the
nameless, faceless quality of Jarrell’s personae
([‘‘RandallJarrell’’]44).Tobegin,itmustbesaid
that Jarrell’s dramatic monologues and dialogues
are not, like Browning’s, said aloud to a listener;
rather, they resemble Tennyson’s monodramas
and Eliot’s interior monologues, Laforguian
utterances of a mind looking inward. Jarrell’s
dramatic poems resemble Shakespearean solilo-
quies, wherein the speaker puts into words those
unutterable truths he or she would tell no one;
they are, for their lyrical qualities, like operatic
arias that capture the speaker’s emotions at an
epiphanic moment. What makes Jarrell’s dra-
matic poems come alive for the reader is their
realization of a concrete situation in time and
place. Although most of his speakers do represent
types, as critics have complained, they are made
unique by their particular relationships to the
worlds around them. ‘‘What,’’ Jarrell once asked
(in a letter to Amy Breyer), ‘‘shall it profit a man if
he gain his own soul and lose the whole world?’’
So much do Jarrell’s speakers depend for their
identity on their situation that the titles of the
dramatic poems often name, not the speaker, but
a place occupied by the speaker. One immediately
recalls ‘‘In the Ward: The Sacred Wood,’’‘‘A Camp
in the Prussian Forest,’’‘‘A Girl in a Library,’’ and
‘‘The Woman at the Washington Zoo.’’ Other titles
fuse speaker with temporal and spatial situation
so that separation is inconceivable; consider ‘‘The
Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,’’‘‘Next Day,’’‘‘A
Street off Sunset,’’ and ‘‘A Man Meets a Woman in
the Street.’’ Still others, like ‘‘Burning the Letters’’
and ‘‘The Player Piano,’’ connect the persona in a
Proustian manner with the object that precipitates
the monologue. Surely Jarrell’s ‘‘dramatic lyrism,’’
as Parker Tyler early phrased it ([‘‘The Dramatic
Lyrism of Randall Jarrell’’] 140), has its earliest
antecedent in the Wordsworthian and Keatsean
dramatic lyric, wherein the speaker and landscape
are interdependent. Add the Laforguian irony that
gives the modern interior monologue its distinctive
tone and one has the main ingredients of Jarrell’s
dramatic poems, themselves recapitulating the
tradition and further extending it into the middle
of the twentieth century, when, in Jarrell’s own
words, the ‘‘reign of the dramatic monologue’’
was finally at an end (Stevens[‘‘The Collected
Poems of Wallace Stevens’’] 66).II
Because Jarrell’s personae are typical rather
than individual, his critics have from the begin-
ning enjoyed classifying the poems according
to similar personae. Tyler’s 1952 groupings of
soldiers, children, and fairy princes (141) have
to give way to include the women who, after the
publication ofA Woman at the Washington Zoo,
became his most frequently employed personae.
To these classes I add the observers, Jarrell’s
most transparent masquers, who, though present
throughout his career, come to prominence in
The Lost World. Here I will illustrate briefly
four groups of Jarrell’s personae—soldiers, chil-
dren, women, and observers—by focusing on one
characteristic poem and, in typical Jarellian man-
ner, naming a few equally characteristic poems
that every Jarrell reader ought to know. To sur-
vey Jarrell’s personae in this order is to recapit-
ulate the approximate succession in which they
became the central concern of his monologues.
The soldiers (or airmen) dominate Jarrell’s second
and third volumes:Little Friend, Little Friendand
Losses. The children have their domain in the
fairytale world ofThe Seven-League Crutches,
his first postwar collection. The women and
observers, though represented in Jarrell’s ear-
lier volumes, come to prominence in his latter
collections,The Woman at the Washington Zoo
andThe Lost World.
The war poems came out of Jarrell’s indirect
involvement with the nightmare world in which
he participated, first as pilot trainee and then
as flight instructor. A long letter to Allen Tate,
dated 1944, provides an astonishingly complete
gloss on these war poems. Jarrell reports havingLosses