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PARTISAN REVIEW
Blood for a Stranger. By Randall Jarrell. Harcourt, Brace. $2.00.
The Second World. By R. P. Blackmur. The Cummington Press. $2.50.
Lyra: An Anthology of New Lyric. Edited by Alex Comfort
&
Robert
Greacen. The Grey Walls Press, Billerieay, Essex. 5/-.
Three New Poets. By Roy McFadden, Alex Comfort
&
Iran Serraillier. The
Grey Walls Press. 2/6.
Ruins and Visions. By Stephen Spender. Random House. $2.00.
Randell Jarrell has the talents, the sensitivity, the wisdom and almost
everything else that the good fairy can give. He is one of the most intelli–
gent persons writing English at the moment. There is some very profound
poetry in this book of his, in the literal sense of that word. But like
Fred Astaire, another very gifted American, he seems to have a blank
personality. He is swallowed up by his gifts. His writing, critical and
poetic, for all its brilliance, lacks a core. I think it is an American
middle-class failing-in which we as the most rationalized human products
of industrialism come close to the insect kingdom-to be too much at
the disposal of our respective trades and in the face of vocational training
not to maintain enough the claims of what only seems extraneous. This
is quite different from craftsman's humility, which lies in subordinating
personal interests to the object being created, not in surrendering the
totality of oneself to a professional role. You give up being a friend,
a lover, a gossip, an attractive person, the life of the party, in order to
be that much more poet, actor, boxer,_doctor, businessman. Instead of
completing yourself by work you mutilate yourself. (In their impatience
with all this, some American writers-Miller, Saroyan, Patchen-go to
the opposite extreme and distend themselves by swallowing their pro–
fessional roles in their personalities.) And for relaxation there is shop–
talk; which led Henry James tq complain that he could get no material
for his art from "down town" New York, from the masculine world of
work, that it was to be found only among women in this country.
As discerned through his writing, Jarrell seems to be too much writer
and too little anything else. Certainly he writes about himself a good
deal, but it is as the abstraction of himself, as fuel for poetry, himself
converted into something that has no further relation to himself except
as professional poet. The paradox is that he appears to be very conscious
of the problem-which is one reason, perhaps, for the conspicuousness
of his shortcomings with respect to it. But more fundamental is his
lack of temperament; and temperament alone, in the absence of every–
thing else, suffices to give a center, a direction and unity to an individual's
work. For lack of it, Jarrell is too easily distracted, is provoked by his
. own fluency, is at the mercy of every idea that strikes him. Although
his single poems are naturally less open to this than his poetry as a
whole, even within them the reader is sometimes exasperated by ·sudden,
unjustifiable changes of direction from stanza to stanza and line to line.
Add Jarrell's unimmediate, unsigned style, through which other poetry,
notably Auden's and Yeats's, seems to have been strained and
depriv~d
