PARTISAN REVIEW
of fixing in verse of absolute legitimacy a perception, nervous and acute,
of our difficult and ambiguous relation to the state. For th.is it is im–
possible, I th.ink, to admire
him
too much, and in the present volume
there are th.ings, "Lines" in particular, that evoke that relationship
with a successful pathos. But there are other poems included, so patently
false in feeling that the language and structure are destroyed utterly;
in the end one is shocked by so blatant a lack of discrimination. From
the closing lines of "A Camp
in
the Prussian Forest" one begins to grow
uneasy.
. ..
and one last breath
Curls from the monstrous chimney
...
I laugh aloud
Again and again,·
The star laughs from its rotting shroud
Of flesh. 0 star of men!
Notice the forced tone, the flat compelling adjectives, the sense of
strain. One begins by thinking that it is perhaps the subject, the inordin–
ate terror of the Jewish plight, that is essentially not .amenable to con–
trolled comment; but there are other poems on other subjects that fail
in similar ways: "0 My Name it is Sam Hall" and "Money," for
instance, the latter an unformulated piece, with all the grossness of
feeling, the obvious irony of an Edgar Lee Masters.
What is the matter? Unlike Everson, Jarrell has basically a regard
for form, but a kind of restless uneasy regard agitated by what seems
a fear of committing h.imself to a final rhetoric, which eventuates in
his
not having what can properly be called a style, a voice of h.is own at
all.
Little Friend, Little Friend,
h.is last book, seemed to have ach.ieved
a single idiom, but it was perhaps after all only a unity of subject, a
subject that survives a little way into th.is book: the anguished com–
radeship of the war, but gives way to others: the remembering of the
dead, the disasters of ch.ildren, the mediation between the poles of hope
and sleep--but whose is the speaking voice? We hear echoes, reminis–
cences of ambiguous import: Masters
in
"Money," Frost in "A Country
Life," Ransom in "Lady Bates"-it is not, of course, a question of
undigested influences in a th.ird volume, but of a distraught quest, an
uncertainty, and an evasion of a certain ultimate responsibility. Through
th.is gap of hesitation, the ruinous pressure of our growing context of
sentimentality assails Jarrell's integrity and our possibilities of response.
John Berryman puts up, I feel, a better struggle. His is a first book
patiently garnered, and without the unevenness wh.ich results from Jar–
rell's obvious impatience to fill up another volume, but there is more
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