On Rereading Randall Jarrell

...In "Absent with Official Leave," Jarrell suggests the regimentation of Army life by describing the soldier's freedom to sleep and dream in a barracks after the lights finally go out...

...Jarrell has a number of good poems on a theme related to the War, the plight of the victims of Nazi oppression...

...he keeps eavesdropping, overhearing conversations instead of participating in them...

...Jarrell had developed a style, a technique, even before he joined the Army...

...His generation of poets, now in their 50s if still living, have proved less durable than one would have supposed just a few years ago...

...Jarrell lacks the magic of Dylan Thomas, the prophetic vision and moral urgency of Robert Lowell, and the sheer brilliance of John Berry-man, who writes with a dazzling knowledge of language and man that is both angelic and demonic...

...The poems are all there: irrevocable, beyond any alteration or addition, a life's work...

...It is all very much like the transmogrifications of the dreams of illness and madness...

...The "just man" of that line is the sergeant playing with the puppy and, through him, every man engaged in a "just" war...

...Many of his poems are philosophical meditations that take the occasion of the piece, the basic incident or scene, as merely a starting point for essayistic excursions...

...It has taken another, much younger generation to see the issue clearly and without flinching...

...This is high praise if one forgets that Polish, French, Russian, and German poets have done pretty well with the theme, and that Jarrell is far less overwhelming than such English products of World War I as Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg...

...The result is a lack of immediacy and involvement...

...The loss of Eden figures prominently in the lives of his soldiers, who are little more than children wandering in the dark woods of time and death and moral betrayal...

...Now, four years later, The Complete Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 507 pp., $10) has been published as his memorial...

...In a more hopeful piece he enters the lives of Jews at Haifa waiting to disembark and take up their task of building a new state on ancestral lands...

...It is obvious that Jarrell the political thinker was unable to face up to the consequences of his moral awareness...

...The "I" character, the moral observer, calls them all "murderers" as he thinks about their activities...

...The key poems of the collection are essentially meditations on the poet's memories of his early life in Los Angeles, mingling the dinosaurs and wrecked sailors of film fantasies (the title is a reference to a motion picture in which the world of dinosaurs and pterodactyls is reconstructed) with images of his father, childhood friends, library adventures, a pet rabbit, and a headless chicken...

...Thus able to view his situation with a poet's eye, he brooded over the routines of Army life—waiting endlessly in lines, being classified, going on patrol or on leave, bombing enemy fines—and gave them symbolic extension...

...And in "The Refugees," written early in World War II, he sees dispossessed travelers riding in a shabby train and makes them symbols of change, movement and perpetual dispossession...

...Mail Call" cries out against the anonymity of Army life...

...There are many other similar poems, including "Transient Barracks," "A Pilot from the Carrier," and "Pilots, Man Your Planes...

...They move along the roads of time with terror in their hearts, questioning, and know that to leave one area of treachery is to face the possibility of new disasters...

...Another theme that seems to have moved Jarrell is lost innocence, the pathos of growing up and growing old...

...At his death, Jarrell had a fine reputation as a poet, critic, novelist, and teacher...

...One of Jarrell's best war poems, and yet in a way least satisfactory, is "Eighth Air Force," where the poet essays a comment on the moral complexities of the socially approved killing we call war...

...A Camp in the Prussian Forest" describes the horrors of a concentration camp with remarkable vividness: "I walk beside the prisoners to the road./ Load on puffed load,/ Their corpses, stacked like sodden wood,/ Lie barred or galled with blood/ By the charred warehouse...

...Here his moral vision is not blurred...

...He has the airman speak an after-death dramatic monologue in the fashion of the characters in Edgar Lee Masters' The Spoon River Anthology, and ends with this brutally direct line: "When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose...

...The theme that truly engaged Jarrell, that stirred his imagination most, was World War II, in which he participated as a U.S...

...His novel, Pictures from an Institution (1954), is even more impressive, a real contribution to the genre of the academic novel...

...Sometimes Jarrell looks at life from too great a distance...

...The ordinary became luminous with meaning...

...No one knows...

...Army Air Corp sergeant...

...All of them constitute a "lost world...

...Although he never does a thorough job of explication in his criticism, in the fashion of the Chicago school, he gets at the excellences and deficiencies of a poet with sudden leaps of insight, valuable gestalten, that one can only admire...

...Jarrell's are bathed in rhetoric...

...Sometimes one senses a tremendous amount of verbal excitement, a superhuman effort to give life to what is essentially inert, as in "An English Garden in Austria...

...But for all the overheated allusions to history, literature, and philosophy, for all the surface whirl and flutter, the poem is undoubtedly dead...

...Time is unkind, and it is doubtful that much of Jarrell's poetry will be read beyond this decade...

...Jarrell's prose, on the other hand, is sharp and perceptive and crackles with wit...

...His prose engages much more of his intellect than his poems, for all their philosophizing...

...He awakes fitfully and hears the "patient breathing of the dark companies/ With whom he labors, sleeps, and dies...

...He describes a group of airmen in their encampment after returning from a bombing run: The drunk sergeant is playing with a puppy, and the others are sleeping, counting missions, and so on...

...In the famous anthology piece, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," Jarrell describes an airman's death in action with a skillful combination of birth and death images...

...This is both a strength, for it is good to have a mind, and a weakness, for he is often garrulous where he might be imaginative or creative...

...a soldier is described as longing for a letter so as to hear his name read loud by the mail orderly: "The soldier simply wishes for his name...

...The children of his poems are driven out of the Eden of parental security into a dark wood where they lose their way and are beset by dangers and betrayals, where nothing is what it seems to be...

...His personal predicament, the real possibility of his own death, merged with the general predicament of his buddies, the Air Corps, and the nation as a whole...

...These men have contributed to that small handful of poems of our time that future generations cannot afford to lose...

...A massive tome containing over 200 poems, it enables the reader to decide for himself whether Jarrell's high renown was deserved...

...His collection of essays, Poetry and the Age (1953), is never dull or boring, as his poems often are...

...A notable fact about these poems is that they are, in general, somber and serious, in accord with their themes, and only rarely witty...

...New Directions published some of his work as early as 1940, and he appeared in literary magazines in the 1930s...

...A state trooper on the scene reported that witnesses told him the poet had "lunged into the side of the car that struck him...

...Randall Jarrell will be remembered for his historical position as the author of war poems, if at all...

...Indeed, he was so highly esteemed by fellow poets that some of them, like Adrienne Rich, thought of him as "the conscience of poetry" and wrote verse "to the mind of Randall Jarrell...

...As everyone knows, the best poetry keeps its ideas and meanings implicit in the action, the scene, the imagery...

...This theme appears in many of Jarrell's poems, early and late, but it is treated most explicitly in the last book published during his lifetime, The Lost World (1965...

...The three themes central to Jarrell's work—war, refugees, and innocence—are really interrelated...

...He was hit by an automobile while walking along a heavily traveled highway in Chapel Hill, North Carolina...

...Was it an accident or a suicide...

...It is a witty, malicious portrait of a woman writer (said to be Mary McCarthy) making her way in a liberal arts college...

...One notes at once the general "impressiveness" of Jarrell's utterance, his Eliot-like allusiveness, and his awareness of the ideas and issues that stirred his intellectual contemporaries—among them war, revolution, psychoanalysis, mythology, alienation, and the dehu-manization of society...

...The poem ends with an easy evasion: "Men wash their hands, in blood, as best they can:/ I find no fault in this just man...

...He is upset by their inconsistencies and moral ambiguities, but is willing to "lie" for them as he recalls the historical context in which they operate...

...Jarrell's refugees, too, are children driven out of their lands, away from the security of their possessions and friendships...

...In this correspondence of dangers he found the energizing emotion and image-making power to create some of the finest American poems of the War...