706
PARTISAN REVIEW
The passages are very different; the first darkens to a profound
quiet, the second rises to a superb visionary rhetoric. Both are excerpts
from poems which don't maintain the same level, therefore particularly
unfair to quote if I were merely admonishing Mr. Jarrell. But
in
both
the rhythm is part of the meaning. Reading Mr. Jarrell's poetry as elegy,
one misses this surrender to primitive metres. This withholding on the
part of so talented a poet seems to come from so deep an immersion
in a Whiteheadian sense of process that mere existence becomes at once
extremely problematic and extremely dense. He is an elegist by nature,
but neither in his verse nor his criticism has he seemed willing to promote
this bias deliberately, thereby gaining some sort of perspective on it.
One might elaborate the idea of the elegy in modem poetry by
saying that twentieth-century poets have, for the first time, an altogether
elegiac attitude toward the kind of language which Dante called "illus–
trious."
Any
use of splendid language and deep, complex rhythms tends
to invoke a lost or ideal reality. You find this tendency appearing
strongly in Milton's early poems with their self-consciously baroque or
Theocritan charms, finally coming to the surface and becoming the main
substance in Eliot and Yeats. "... where the walls of Magnus Martyr
hold inexplicable splendor of Ionian white and gold," and where
"... the lost heart stiffens and rejoices in the lost lilac and the lost sea
voices." Even in his most intimate lyrics, like "A Prayer for my
Daughter," Yeats's use of the fulsome or the old word, though never
obtrusively artificial, is nevertheless elegiac and emblematic at once.
The stanza which begins, "May she become a flourishing hidden
tree . . . ," beautiful as it is, hardly seems to express the poet's sense
of any actual likelihood. Certainly Yeats himself would have gone crazy
"Rooted in one dear perpetual place." There's a difference between this
attitude and Marvell's; Marvell invokes a Platonic ideal which is still
intermittently possible, Yeats expresses an ideal possibility which is lost
for good.
When you tum to Mr. Jarrell's criticism, you find the missing
rhythms in abundance, picking up momentum from the
Zeitgeist
itself.
Here is all the buzz and hum of a nation of eclectic connoisseurs warm–
ing to the job of appreciation and analysis. Here the stance of the
neutral observer is taken for granted and becomes an asset. Here the
extreme fatalism, the "romantic" sense of man's helplessness before na–
ture and history (to invoke the Babbitt-Winters argument) is not re–
quired to declare itself openly except when the critic's predilections hap–
pen to coincide with those of another poet, and then usually in the
veiled terms of enthusiastic pleasure. More often than not, his praise
