I have been reading about the poet Randall Jarrell’s criticism and have repeatedly came across the claim that he helped revive the reputations of several poets, mainly Walt Whitman and Robert Frost, but also William Carlos Williams.
It’s hard for me to fathom that any of those poets ever needed help. I can’t imagine anyone not admiring their work.
But I’m no scholar. I have no idea what the climate was like in English departments when Randall was writing criticism. (Jarrell’s first volume of collected prose, Poetry and the Age, was published in 1953. He died in 1965.)
One of the preoccupations of this series of notes is the role of the common reader in keeping alive the work of neglected writers. I’ve thought less about the role of critics and scholars. In many cases, those roles are combined. Jarrell taught English and wrote about poetry for periodicals.
William Carlos Williams was a physician, rather than an English scholar or critic, but he tried to promote the works of younger authors he admired.
When David Ignatow’s first book, Poems, was published in 1948, Williams wrote: “These poems, the best of them, ought to be printed on pulp and offered at Woolworth’s, a dime a copy. They’d sell, too. For these are poems for the millions.”
Williams said that good writing can touch the humblest lives and did so in Ignatow’s poems. I can’t read Ignatow without thinking of that line.
• Source: Several good articles about Randall Jarrell’s criticism are online, including Brad Leithauser, “’No other book’: Jarrell’s criticism,” The New Criterion, April 1999. It’s here:
https://newcriterion.com/issues/1999/4/ldquono-other-bookrdquo-randall-jarrells-criticism
Jarrell was writing in the time of the New Criticism, with its emphasis on ambiguity, irony, and the reconciliation of opposites in poetry. If you look at the later Selected Poems, ed. by Charles Tomlinson, you can see a marked difference between Jarrell’s WCW and Tomlinson’s.
ReplyDeleteWCW was no favorite in the world of English studies when Jarrell was writing. And Lorine Niedecker, say, was unheard of. Poet-readers were way ahead of academic readers in finding value in their work.
Thanks, Michael. I'll look for Tomlinson's edition. It's interesting how different kinds of readers find value.
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