BOO KS
705
Dead" or "Mediterranean" nightmares? My own unorthodox feeling is
simply that in his best poems Ransom is the more memorable poet.
Qualify and dissent as we may, the fact is plain that Mr. Jarrell is
a critic who brings more loving care, more intelligent good will, to his
criticism than most of us can afford.
If,
as he once wrote, Dr. Williams
is "the America of poets," he is in some significant sense the America
of critics, which brings us to a question which D. H. Lawrence was
probably the first European to pose. How to reconcile what an American
writer appreciates and what he projects? In the case of Mr. Jarrell, how
to reconcile the tone of his poetry and the tone of his criticism? From
the beginning, his poems have been a:bout losses, though his tone (very
roughly speaking) has mellowed from indignation to a wistful nostalgia.
The bomber pilot loses a life he never had, the young girl loses a dream,
Vienna loses its baroque amenity. The life of his poems-and the least
one can say is that they do have subjects and a life of their own-is so
faint that one is tempted to think of this world as a sort of pastoral
frieze. Violent things happen, but as part of the weather rather than
the action. Briefly, then, Mr. Jarrell takes an elegiac attitude toward
his subjects, though few of his poems are immediately recognizable as
elegies, lacking as they do the familiar elegiac rhythms. I should cite a
couple of touchstones by way of contrast, moments when an extreme
sense of separation and loss releases a correspondingly brilliant utterance.
Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home
And at your threshold set you .down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Frowning and forefending angel-warder
Squander the hell-rook ranks sally to molest him,'
March, kind comrade, abreast him;
Dress his days to a dexterous and starlight order.
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