Everyone seeks respectability—even the outlaw and the ruffian seek it on some level, even if they don’t say so.
The desire for respectability lies at the core of civilized life. The desire for respectability is so ingrained, we hardly wish to admit to ourselves naked emperors are everywhere, though inside all of us know this to be true.
This operates powerfully in Letters—where all poets are potentially critics—and most critics have a burning desire to be respected as poets.
No one who seeks a literary reputation today will dare to speak above a whisper against two things in particular—nothing is considered greater, nothing more honored, in Letters, than The Four Quartets (1943) by poet/critic T.S. Eliot (who won the Nobel Prize in 1948) and the literary criticism of poet/critic Randall Jarrell. Poetry and the Age is Jarrell’s iconic book of criticism published in 1953.
This could change.
Reputations rise and fall—in minutes.
This has been true for quite a while, however: The agony of the poet has been acute for 100 years.
For 100 years a discussion of poetry has been replaced by “why isn’t poetry read?”
There was a time, shortly before World War Two—around the time many people alive today were born—when T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Randall Jarrell were unknown—and if you “weren’t there,” it is hard to understand that names as common now as Cartier, Chanel or Gucci were obscure, and it was very likely they would remain obscure.
Crazy luck, hard work, networking, all the accidents of the “luckily met” and unpredictable outside influences bubble up into notoriety and fame.
Critics hesitate to trace or embrace this winding truth; it is easier (since they “weren’t there”) to assert, “Why, he’s…he’s…Ezra Pound! He wrote this! And that!”
Given the current political climate (I hear Walt Whitman was just cancelled) and given that Jarrell, Eliot, and Pound and were conservative white men, any fame they have is still in jeopardy—as it always is, of course, for all of us.
Which is why we work hard, have children, write poems, criticize, talk.
Talking and poetry are very close to each other. Talking can take the form of sealing a publishing deal, composing a poem, or writing a critical essay. And inevitably proper names are attached.
In conversation, there is “the poetry” and “my poems” and every person in Letters means the second when they talk about the first.
Great poets are found by fame, after working for a long time alone.
The minor poets network, form cliques, and bash the great poets. Fame is like food, only more so—there is only so much to go around, but occasionally fame can feed a few if they are lucky to be merely standing next to it.
A minor intellect seeking fame is an embarrassment—unless it is successful; then it goes from humiliation in the street to a “literary revolution” which makes it on to a syllabus.
The minor poet or poet-critic in a state of fame-seeking arousal inevitably exhibits circular and contradictory reasoning in every instance—this is how we know (if we read carefully) what is going on. They will hate romantic poetry because it is romantic poetry. They will say criticism is dull as they impute criticism in a manner as dull as humanly possible. They will cry out in despair that no one reads widely anymore—as they habitually name-drop the same handful of their poet friends.
Or wishing desperately to solidify their reputation (a radical one) in old age, they will write heavy-sounding, pontifical nonsense:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation. *
* What stands out is the helplessness of the weak and circular reasoning: we perhaps speculate today perpetually on tomorrow. Or, time exists but a time machine doesn’t. To prevent too much “time present” abstraction, the poet reaches out for a “rose-garden” and the “unheard music in the shrubbery, And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses Had the look of flowers that are looked at.” But it’s too late. We know for certain this isn’t the T.S. Eliot of Prufrock; this is an old poet twenty years past the peak of his powers.
Randall Jarrell demonstrates in his criticism better than anyone the phenomenon I sadly describe (“the look of flowers that are looked at”)—Jarrell was poised between two ages—the success of the Modernist Revolution in real terms (young Eliot’s haunting compositions) and the success of the Modernist revolution in institutional terms (“Four Quartets, the Nobel, the college syllabus), the institutional success threatening to wipe out the earlier one with its flood of cheap radicalism and ambitious credentialism.
Additionally, Jarrell exhibits the ambition of a brilliant writer in the thick of the Modernist ascendancy tantalizingly close to the first rank but clearly confined to the second (no one reads his books of poems; some who are influential read his criticism). Randall Jarrell had connections: Robert Lowell, John Ransom—but he knew who the real stars were (aging but established): Whitman (the only one who was dead), Pound, Eliot, Williams, Stevens, Bishop, Moore, and, of course, Frost—and here was a wrinkle.
Frost, like Auden to a much lesser degree, (no we don’t mean a wrinkled face) was more famous than every Modernist poet combined. Robert Frost wrote the kind of famous rhyming poems the public still adored—the same public the Modernist revolutionaries hated, but were now courting in the college syllabus (an end run appeal).
Jarrell was torn. (Rereading Jarrell today we can see how much this ruined him.) Jarrell hedged his bets, placing a lot of chips on Frost even as he heaped adoration on WC Williams.
Keats was rumored to have been “killed by a criticism” (it wasn’t true) but Jarrell was, in fact, hospitalized for depression by a negative review of his poems. The Romantics were tougher—they fed on virtuosity and Nature. The Modernists lived on reputation, experimental-poetry-with-something-to-prove, and reviews.
To attempt to love both Frost and Williams is to be unconscious as a critic. It keeps one from being clear; one ends up repeating innocuous observations instead of really reading the work: writing whole reviews in which the subject’s poems are not quoted, gushing that Whitman, Frost, and Williams are “American”—as if calling some American poet “American” in a positive sense can possibly mean anything.
Jarrell lovingly reviews Frost but with all sorts of hesitancy and qualifications—he knows he is taking a risk by praising a poet ordinary people (the kind who have never heard of Ezra Pound) like. “Frost has limitations of a kind very noticeable to us.” Jarrell takes pains to examine what he considers lesser-known Frost poems. He quotes this “least familiar” poem and afterwards explores its philosophical weight, “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep:”
The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.
As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.
The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be—
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.
They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?
How can one reconcile Jarrell’s (somewhat guilty, true) admiration of “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep” (he compares it to “Housman) to his schoolboy crush on Paterson (Book I)? “I read it [Paterson] seven or eight times, and ended lost in delight.”
No one who likes Frost could possibly like Williams:
“Stale as a whale’s breath: breath!/Breath!”
“Clearly!/speaks the red-breast his behest. Clearly!/clearly!”
To understand Frost, we need to ask: Is poetry really nothing but this: Wisdom which rhymes. Or is it rhyme which is wise? Unconscious critics don’t ask these questions.
There is nothing to understand about “Stale as a whale’s breath: breath!/Breath!” There just isn’t. God save us from that wheel barrow. From those plums.
Poetry is refined talk. Conscious refinement in itself is a boon in many ways to society. To clobber refinement for some “primal truth” is the stuff of revolution—which ends in nightmare.
Poems we unconsciously like should be a red flag. Admiring “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep” is a conscious activity—to admire Williams is to be unconscious.
Those born in the late 19th century (Thomas Eliot was born in 1888, WC Williams was born in 1883) were swept up in the exciting novelty of the age (cinema, looser sex, the Russian revolution, the automobile, the Great War)—and therefore were impatient (loose sex, cars, and movies make one impatient) to be revolutionary artists.
Radical art of the early 20th century! Old people never understand—but now they really didn’t understand. The 1960s truly began in the 1920s.
By the time Jarrell publishes Poetry And the Age WC Williams is 70 years old and just beginning to get a respectable name for himself—“The Red Wheel Barrow” is ancient history.
What else to call it? It was “the age;” it swept people along and it swept the arts and everything else along with it—it had nothing to do with choices; the poets had to be this way. They had to write poetry that was different. And they did. And no one read it. But the revolution could not be stopped: You will either read our poetry, or you will listen to us complaining that you ought to read it and if you don’t read it, we will take over the schools and become professors—and make you read it. And this is exactly what happened. The revolution succeeded even as it failed. The “old” was dragged, kicking and screaming, into the “new,” by revolutionaries who robotically obeyed “the age”—even against their will. They were sorry they didn’t rhyme often enough, but they couldn’t help it. It was the “Age” of Jarrell’s title. The “Age” must be fed.
Randall Jarrell describes the revolution in poetry of his time—and its failure. He is a bitter revolutionary:
“Since most people know about the modern poet only that he is obscure—i.e., that he is difficult, i.e., that he is neglected—they naturally make a casual connection between the two meanings of the word, and decide that he is unread because he is difficult. Some of the time this is true; some of the time the reverse is true: the poet seems difficult because he is not read, because the reader is not accustomed to reading his or any other poetry. But most of the time neither is a cause—both are no more than effects of that long-continued, world-overturning cultural and social revolution (seen at its most advanced stage here in the United States) which has made the poet difficult and the public unused to any poetry exactly as it has made poet and public divorce their wives, stay away from church, dislike bull-baiting, free the slaves, get insulin shots for diabetes, or do a hundred thousand other things, some bad, some good, and some indifferent.”
We (the modern poets) Jarrell insists, are not obscure; we (and he smiles sadly and whimsically) are not read—for no reason that anyone can tell.
In the same essay he writes: “If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and once we were out of the habit, their clarity does not help.” He’s in a philosophical quandary. Plainly, “obscurity” and “clarity” are nothing and everything to him.
Jarrell is a regular mess. He knows something is wrong, but is sure nothing is wrong.
“The general public [in this lecture I hardly speak of the happy few, who grow fewer and unhappier day by day] has set up a criterion of its own, one by which every form of contemporary art is condemned. This criterion is, in the case of music, melody; in the case of painting, representation; in the case of poetry, clarity.”
It’s difficult to know whether or not Jarrell comprehends how much he is like a dog chasing his tail. He is certain contemporary poets (of which tacitly he is one) are not obscure, but even if they were, it would not matter, but he understands they are not read (in fact they are condemned!) and he does not know why they are not read, except they seem to be condemned for lacking clarity. Yet clarity is not a factor because this is not what makes poetry popular. Jarrell’s indulgence in self-torture is touching, if not horrifying.
“Is Clarity the handmaiden of Popularity, as everybody automatically assumes? how much does it help to be immediately plain? In England today few poets are as popular as Dylan Thomas—his magical poems have corrupted a whole generation of English poets; yet he is surely one of the most obscure poets who ever lived.”
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night is obscure? The popular poems of Dylan Thomas are not obscure, but rather than debate this, it’s better to concede Jarrell’s point: “obscurity” is only a matter of education—the obscure is only so to the unlearned. Yet—this is but a truism. Something else is bothering Jarrell. What is it?
Here’s a clue:
“Many a man, because Ezra Pound is too obscure for him, has shut forever the pages of Paradise Lost.”
If we were to arrest Jarrell and seize his papers we would see what sort of spy-mission he is on.
Jarrell’s lament is that not enough people read contemporary poetry. But he doesn’t stop there. He points out that Shakespeare is difficult (obscure). He repeats a survey which says that half of Americans don’t read books.
He doesn’t come right out and compare Milton to Pound. And yet he does, anyway.
Milton is Beethoven and Pound is a toy trumpet. And yet. Jarrell mourns that no one reads Milton. Jarrell mourns that no one reads Pound. The message for new audiences interested in poetry, students, anyone who is not enamored of the old, great poetry and yet is curious about poetry in general is this: The damned stupid public understands neither Milton nor Pound. Milton is dead. The damned stupid public will mock you even more for loving what’s gone. But Pound, at least, is…alive. He’s…new.
In his essay, “The Age of Criticism,” Jarrell complains that too many writers are writing criticism but he doesn’t point out a single good critic. On page 81 we get an elaborate anecdote in which Jarrell takes a condescending tone towards a poet who asks Jarrell about Paterson: is it really any good? We are supposed to think, as we read this, “Of course Paterson is good!”
On page 82 we get, “To the question ‘Have you read Gerontion?'[Eliot 1920]—or some other poem that may seem difficult to people—I’ve several times heard people reply: ‘Well, not really—I’ve read it, but I’ve never read a thorough analysis of it, or really gone through it systematically.” Jarrell’s point is that too much criticism has addled the brains of readers who would otherwise be reading T.S. Eliot (Eliot! Pure! In the flesh!) like mad. Jarrell seems unaware that no one read the Modernists (in their little magazines of the 1920s) until they began to seep into the university—on the backs of criticism. What happened, of course, is criticism took on a life of its own—failing to properly reward the leaders of the revolution. And this has made Jarrell either melancholy, or ambitious for the sake of the revolution he hopes will make famous those in his generation, too.
In another anecdote, this one on page 15 in the book, a worldly and wealthy gentleman on a ship to Europe asks Jarrell who his favorite American poets are and Jarrell says “Oh, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost.” In short, the gentleman, who Jarrell otherwise highly admires, answers, “I don’t believe I’ve heard of them.” We are supposed to believe this a very great tragedy.
Why does Jarrell tell this story? Is he trying to say Frost and Eliot are equally obscure? In the mid-20th century Frost was a hundred times better known than T.S. Eliot. And it’s probably still true.
Is Jarrell pretending to hate the briar patch of “obscurity”—where all great poets now reside?
We need to read the first page of the book, from the essay, “The Obscurity of the Poet,” to find the answer:
“When I was asked to talk about the Obscurity of the Modern Poet I was delighted, for I have suffered from this obscurity all my life. But then I realized that I was being asked to talk not about the fact that people don’t read poetry, but about the fact that most of them wouldn’t understand it if they did: about the difficulty, not the neglect, of contemporary poetry. And yet it is not just modern poetry, but poetry, that is today obscure. Paradise Lost is what it was; but the ordinary reader no longer makes the mistake of trying to read it—instead he glances at it, weighs it in his hand, shudders, and suddenly, his eyes shining, puts it on his list of the ten dullest books he has ever read, along with Moby Dick, War and Peace, Faust, and Boswell’s Life of Johnson. But I am doing this ordinary reader an injustice: it was not the Public, nodding over its lunch-pail, but the educated reader, the reader the universities have trained, who a few weeks ago, to the Public’s sympathetic delight, put together this list of the world’s dullest books.”
To the “delight” of the working-class “Public,” even the “educated reader” finds Paradise Lost dull.
We almost think Jarrell is delighted by this, as well, perhaps in a fit of schadenfreude, because, after all, no one reads his (Jarrell’s) poems, but we are not sure. (He actually inserts an original poem into the first essay of the book.)
But recall again Jarrell’s words: “Many a man, because Ezra Pound is too obscure for him, has shut forever the pages of Paradise Lost.”
The prize was almost won—the Modernist revolutionaries of the 1920s were coming into their own—but then suddenly everyone stopped reading poetry!
Or, as Jarrell complains in his essay, “The Age of Criticism,” everyone is writing only criticism. The “literary quarterlies” each contain “several poems and a piece of fiction”…the rest is criticism. The rest is criticism. The words have a dull uneasy sound; they lie on the spirit with a heavy weight.” Jarrell says the criticism is good and bad—but in the essay he quotes not one word of any of it, but Jarrell makes it pretty clear that it’s almost all dull—and the quarterlies should be printing the poems of Ezra Pound, instead.
How would Jarrell have reacted to what came after him—he complained there was too much criticism. What would he have thought of the rise of Theory? Or the rise of poetry, where no readers exist who are not poets, and every poet has the ambition of a Randall Jarrell and every day poems are published which sound like this?
“Stale as a whale’s breath: breath!/Breath!”
“Clearly!/speaks the red-breast his behest. Clearly!/clearly!”
He would have been horrified, and I don’t think he could have seen this coming because he made the mistake so many intellectuals make—he underestimated the people; he looked down on them; he made judgments based not on merit and the long view, but on the sorts of distinctions which thrill us in the moment.
He made the mistake of thinking William Carlos Williams was better for people than the New York Daily News. It’s not. Jarrell was a utopian, a snobby one at that—and this made him blind to grounded, democratic principles. Look at this brilliant passage, which shows that he should have known better than to think, in terms which are nothing but pure snobbery, that the Modernist poet was going to save the world:
“When Mill and Marx looked at a handful of workingmen making their slow firm way through the pages of Shelley or Herbert Spencer or The Origin of Species, they thought with confident longing, just as Jefferson and Lincoln had, of the days when every man would be literate, when an actual democracy would make its choices with as much wisdom as any imaginary state where the philosopher is king: and no gleam of prophetic insight came to show them those workingmen, two million strong, making their easy and pleasant way through the pages of the New York Daily News. The very speeches in which Jefferson and Lincoln spoke of their hope for the future are incomprehensible to most of the voters of that future, since the vocabulary and syntax of the speeches are more difficult—more obscure—than anything the voters have read or heard. For when you defeat me in an election simply because you were, as I was not, born and bred in a log cabin, it is only a question of time until you are beaten by someone whom the pigs brought up out in the yard. The truth that all men are politically equal, the recognition of the injustice of fictitious differences, becomes a belief in the fictitiousness of differences, a conviction that it is reaction and snobbishness or Fascism to believe that any individual differences of real importance exist.”
Yes, Mr. Jarrell, “individual differences of real importance exist,” beginning with Shakespeare put beside WC Williams. The assumption that a person who reads the New York Daily News cannot understand Lincoln or Jefferson is nothing more than a snobby assumption on your part—nor did these “workingmen” pass on WC Williams because Williams was “obscure” or “difficult” or Williams had too much in common with Abraham Lincoln. They rejected him for more basic reasons, which anyone, even a professor, or a great critic like yourself, should be able to understand.