Jarrell Dug Auden

...Already he had a reputation for being deadly and accurate, so that his close friend Robert Lowell could boast that he “left many reputations permanently altered and exalted.’’ On any number of fellow poets, Jarrell could be fascinating, but the one who enchanted (and then frustrated) him the most was Auden...

...Let’s just say that if Auden’s reputation is an immovable object, then Jarrell’s wit is the irresistible force—and many are moved by it...

...Stephen Burt is a poet, critic, professor, and scholar—some readers may be familiar with his reviews in The Believer or his two collections of poetry—but it is in this last occupation that he has rendered his best service to literature...

...They are not, let the reader be warned, an exercise in hagiography (Auden’s literary executor, Edward Mendelson, should skip this book...

...But he does not say about the poems, “here is God’s plenty...

...And how much more of Randall Jarrell still remains to be discovered...

...Jarrell’s castaway, his ideal reader, is then rescued and handed Auden’s last book of poetry to read: I imagine that the castaway has worked out for his book a long complicated analysis of Auden’s development—this is particularly easy for me to imagine, since I have done so myself—have printed the analysis in Partisan Review, even—and could keep you here till midnight, and tomorrow midnight, and midnight a fortnight hence, describing Stage I and Stage II and Stage III...

...Blackmur and Robert Fitzgerald, Jarrell proceeded to cavort in what he called his “gay-serious” mode on the transformation of the greatest English poet of the 20th century into an automaton of rhetorical devices...

...Though Jarrell thought he was in fine form—“able to think of long elaborate sentences, lovely phrases, attractive informalities, etc...

...According to the New York Times, at a Yale memorial service in 1966, Peter Taylor told the crowd that, after Jarrell started playing with the Vanderbilt tennis team, “players like Don Budge were to be seen reading books of poetry...

...To a semi-private audience that included R.P...

...I can hear you say, “Yes, but how persuasive is it...

...Our castaway would surely cry out in delight, after his first look at Auden’s new book: “Stage IV...

...But Auden seems to be saying, Come back in five years and you’ll never know me...

...I see him disappearing into a cabin, his lips moving as if to say, “All changed, changed utterly...

...For this is Jarrell in the fullness of his powers, speaking at length on his favorite subject, and the results are as exhilarating as Benzedrine...

...Oh, give me some paper, hand me a pencil...

...If there was an ounce of sense in the American literary academy, Burt would be dispatched tomorrow to put together the Collected Works in a handsome edition, from the manuscripts at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (where Jarrell taught) and in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library...

...After a few days, awed at their improbable variety, he begins to think of Auden as a Proteus upon whose back he can ride off in all directions...

...Here is far more than plenty, he looks about askance, and thinks it all some black or at least shady magic—particularly so because the magician keeps protesting, book in and book out, that it’s all white, white...

...He can be—in rapid succession— gushing, pedantic, casual, and dismissive without losing our interest...

...These polished lecture notes should take an honored place alongside Jarrell’s four volumes of published criticism as further testament to one of the great American stylists of critical prose...

...As it is, we shall no doubt have to wait another 50 years to enjoy Jarrell complete and unabridged...

...Such is Jarrell’s prose when it soars...

...On the basis of the evidence—now unearthed, polished, and annotated for us by Stephen Burt—Blackmur must have been suffering from constipation or envy...

...Though his first collection of criticism, Poetry and the Age, would not appear for another year, Jarrell had made a name for himself as the literary editor for the Nation and a poetry critic for Partisan Review...

...How is it that such a treasure was kept in the library stacks unpublished for 50 years...

...Ordinarily, a poet’s Come back and you will find me just the same is the truth...

...The castaway grumbles: “He moralizes me to the top of my bent...

...Stage IV...

...And how fair is Jarrell ultimately to Auden and his poetry...

...his fellow critic Blackmur was apparently unamused...

...In the first lecture, Jarrell imagines a castaway on an island reading through Auden’s collected works: Our castaway reads all the poems that Auden has ever written...

...As for the rest of the audience, their impressions have not come down to us...

...His previous book, Randall Jarrell and His Age, struck me as a dull dissertation...

...Garrick Davis is the founding editor of Contemporary Poetry Review...

...There is, however, a consistency to the magic...

...Finishing it, one remembers what the president of Jesus College murmured, in despair, after leaving one of Matthew Arnold’s lectures: “. . . the Angel ended...

...his editing of this book is another matter...