Disturbing Randall Jarrell

Abstract

Some literary judgments have the force of bad supreme court rulings-it takes decades to get them overturned. The Plessey v. Ferguson of Jarrell criticism is Helen Vendler's 1969 verdict that Randall Jarrell put his genius into his criticism and his talent into his (111). For more than 30 years critics have mounted case after case to topple her decision, but it persists because it makes life-or at least literary history-easier. It justifies ignoring Jarrell's extraordinary poetry and resting contentedly with Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop as the king and queen of the middle generation prom. The courts of critical opinion have advanced various theories to explain why Jarrell is not more highly regarded as a poet, but I think the answer is quite simple: he is too disturbing and in ways that are hard to pigeonhole. Indeed, he seems more disturbing than Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, or John Berryman and all the more so because he does not appear to be shocking. If the poems announced straightforwardly, I'm going to be difficult and unpleasant to live with! readers would gird themselves in the protective armor they use for reading Amiri Baraka or John Ashbery, and Jarrell's reputation would have increased. Instead, he fills his poems with folkand fairy tales, children and talking animals, all the distractions of easy reading, and then shoots you between the eyes. It seems unfair. If only there were the personal revelations of Sexton, Plath, or Lowell or the dirty words of Allen Ginsberg, the reader would feel on safe ground. Jarrell's personal life, by and large, seemed quite wholesome. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, he was not a drunk or a womanizer, and until the end of his life he appeared to be a model of psychic health. People remember him being strangely fastidious: he did not use obscene language or tell smutty stories, and he disliked it when others did (Pitchard 121). Yet the reviews of his books as they appeared show enormous uneasiness with the poems. A critic of Jarrell's first volume, Blood for a Stranger (1942), wrote that he presented a boy's thoughts painfully and almost unbearably (Lechlitner 17). Karl Shapiro a decade later felt the Selected Poems (1955) were painful and just short of unbearable