Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden
Edited by Stephen Burt with Hannah Brooks-Motl
Columbia, 178 pp., $36.50
In 1952, Randall Jarrell delivered six lectures at Princeton devoted to the work of W.H. Auden at Princeton. 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. 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.
To a semi-private audience that included R.P. 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.”–his fellow critic Blackmur was apparently unamused. As for the rest of the audience, their impressions have not come down to us.
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. 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. They are not, let the reader be warned, an exercise in hagiography (Auden’s literary executor, Edward Mendelson, should skip this book). In the first lecture, Jarrell imagines a castaway on an island reading through Auden’s collected works:
There is, however, a consistency to the magic. Jarrell’s castaway, his ideal reader, is then rescued and handed Auden’s last book of poetry to read:
Such is Jarrell’s prose when it soars. He can be–in rapid succession–gushing, pedantic, casual, and dismissive without losing our interest. I can hear you say, “Yes, but how persuasive is it? And how fair is Jarrell ultimately to Auden and his poetry?” 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. 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.”
How is it that such a treasure was kept in the library stacks unpublished for 50 years? And how much more of Randall Jarrell still remains to be discovered? 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. As it is, we shall no doubt have to wait another 50 years to enjoy Jarrell complete and unabridged.
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. His previous book, Randall Jarrell and His Age, struck me as a dull dissertation; his editing of this book is another matter. 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.
Finishing it, one remembers what the president of Jesus College murmured, in despair, after leaving one of Matthew Arnold’s lectures: “. . . the Angel ended.”
Garrick Davis is the founding editor of Contemporary Poetry Review.
