Selected Poems

by Randall Jarrell, William H. Pritchard (Editor)

From the narratives of army life during World War Two to the domestic and familial scenes of his final book, this selection presents Jarrell's art at its best, comparable in power and variety to that of his contemporaries Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop.

Genres: Poetry, Literature

115 pages, Hardcover

Published April 19, 1990

About the author

Poems, published in collections such as Little Friend, Little Friend (1945), of American poet and critic Randall Jarrell concern war, loneliness, and art.

He wrote eight books of poetry, five anthologies, a novel, Pictures from an Institution . Maurice Sendak illustrated his four books for children, and he translated Faust: Part I and The Three Sisters , which the studio of actors performed on Broadway; he also translated two other works. He received the National Book Award for poetry in 1960, served as poet laureate at the Library of Congress in 1957 and 1958, and taught for many years at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He joined as a member of the American institute of arts and letters.

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness
And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

The first twenty pages of this collection were stunning. I found myself mesmerized, deeply impacted. The reactions within the verse were blunted, sometimes gaping. I returned to the tome as the day sped along. My subsequent stops were not as eventful. There was an effort at scripted empathy. Then as matters wound down and the poet (close in age to myself) looks at a photograph of his parents holding him as an infant. He recognizes that he is much older at that moment than what his parents were when captured in such a hopeful instant. That particular torque wasn't as effective, particularly in a scrum of pages where Proust is continuously mentioned, almost a talisman. My indecisive pause is meaningful, perhaps only in these human loops of flawed reasoning.

[Holly · Rating 3 out of 5]

"90 North" is one of my all-time favorite poems; I have the last third memorized. And I have always been a fan of Jarrell's World War II poetry. I bought this book ages ago so I would have easy access to some of those beloved poems. Then I never got around to reading it because I felt like I was already familiar with many of the poems in it.

Finally reading it now from cover to cover, well, I still love the WWII poems, but so many of the others.... they haven't all aged well. Some of them seem mired in details, and some of them are disturbingly condescending--"A Girl in a Library," for instance. I'm not the biggest Auden fan, but "Musee des Beaux Arts" is a far better poem than "The Old and the New Masters," Jarrell's poem in response to it.

I wish I liked this better but I just don't.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

All of his poems end in death, almost as if each one is its own little life. They aren't morbid, they're just aware in the way that a conscious human can't help but be aware. It's a rare thing to be able to make little humans out of your poems, but Jarrell does it over and over. He makes young just as convincing as old, men just as convincing as women. He sometimes wastes his time down blind dead ends, but usually there's at least some gold dust at the end of the path.

In a secular way, Jarrell gets as close as you can to the paradox of spirituality, the comfort with discomfort, while remaining accessible. Of course, it's through the poetry itself that he does this. He knows that we know his poems will end in death, but still it's somehow fresh each time. That's the real talent: not writing a twist ending and relying on spoiler warnings, but telling the reader ahead of time how it will end, and still wowing us.

The introduction of this book summed things up nicely: every poet has duds, even the best, but their great triumphs make us forgive the others. Even within his poems, they often sag a bit in the middle, but the ending always gets me. He gets me. He understands the central modern anxiety is the certainty of death in spite of the uncertainties in every other aspect of life. Things change so fast that we don't get a chance to fix our eyes on death and stare it down like we used to when the world stood still in the center of the cosmos. Instead, we are often left scattered at random like the seeds on the rocks in Christ's parable.

What I love about Jarrell, and hate about so many other modern and post-modern authors, is that he has a conscience but he doesn't preach. He has fears but doesn't despair. He's a rare voice of simplicity and depth. Everyone else seems to pose so much, whether it was the modernists who made too many pretentious references, or the post-modernists who feel the weight of algorithms and book reviews (cough). Jarrell doesn't even say "fuck it", he just does what he does.

It's also interesting how the poem he's known for, "Death of a Ball Turret Gunner", is still his best one and an adequate summary of his work. The war ruined his innocence but sparked his skill. Truly, trauma is probably the impetus of all that is good in the world, or at least all that is creative. I can understand why the ancient pagans often started their creation myth with a death and dismemberment, since it's the impossible which breeds the possible. It's the unthinkable which forces us to come up with words to come to terms with reality.

Poetry's strength is in both its brevity and how much people hate it. If it were popular, it would have no power. If it were verbose, it would start to lie. The more words, the more lies. Which is why he can write with absolute seriousness and sincerity "They said, 'Here are the maps'; we burned the cities." Nothing more need be said about the bombing of cities. It's all covered here, almost too much. Instead, he focuses on the inescapable orbit of death which results, his own as compared to that of the cities:

It was not dying--no, not ever dying;
But the night I died I dreamed that I was dead,
And the cities said to me: "Why are you dying?
We are satisfied, if you are; but why did I die?"

If the dead could talk, what would they say? Not just the individuals, but the cities, cultures, ideas, songs, languages. Death is more than just a personal thing, it's a universal thing. Everyone personally must experience it, which makes it both universal yet isolating. As Jimi Hendrix once sang, "I'm the one that's gonna have to die when it's time for me to die." Jarrell's poems thus don't just describe death, but they embody the same ethos, being universal yet individual. They talk about what cannot be discussed, the nothing at the center of the everything.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the remarkable things about Jarrell's work, as exhibited in this selection, is his ability to give voice to female characters and embody their inner lives. Of course my favorite remains "90 North", but there is strong work in many other poems here.

Reading a second time, fall 2021.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

PPE 6/25/08

[Chloe Shaw · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Really I began the day
Not with a man’s wish: “May this day be different,”
But with the birds’ wish: “May this day
Be the same day, the day of my life.”