A paper presented at "The First Postmodernists Conference," National Poetry Foundation, Orono, ME, June 1993.

"The End of the Line": Randall Jarrell, the '30s, and Postmodernism

I have written elsewhere of the personal and biographical elements of Randall Jarrell's apprentice work, focusing particularly on his obsession with remembered childhood experience. ⁽¹⁾ But in this essay I would like to focus on the development of Jarrell's literary and political coming of age in the thirties. The thirties' work that Jarrell chose to collect in "The Rage for the Lost Penny" represents, I think, his attempt to distance himself from the influence and reactionary politics of his Agrarian mentors. As I hope to show, the context of the periodical publication of the 35 poems Jarrell published between 1934 and 1940 can restore to us the complexity of the young poet's struggle to escape the provincial climate of Nashville and Vanderbilt in order to come to locate himself in the broader world of literature and politics. Because Jarrell himself so often revised his poetic and critical personae, by omitting and obscuring the chronology of many of his early poems, and by selecting for publication his evaluative rather than theoretical essays, what follows will, admittedly, be somewhat speculative. I do hope, however, that the speculations will serve as a corrective to the portrait of Jarrell's life and work constructed by William Pritchard's Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life and edition of Selected Poems.

In his insightful review of Pritchard's version of Jarrell, Langdon Hammer observes that "the limits which govern Pritchard's selection of Jarrell's poems are the same ones that govern his telling of the life" (396). What makes both books so disappointing are that Pritchard's main interest in Jarrell is that he provides a vehicle for Pritchard's own "defense not only of a particular kind of literary criticism, but of a particular kind of literary life--the ordinary, bourgeois, academic life" (394). Pritchard's anti-theoretical stance ignores "Jarrell's mawkishness, his early Marxism, his `femininity'"(396); deliberately evading "the emotional centers of Jarrell's life," Pritchard's account rules out the "specifically theoretical questions" that "would make plain how much Jarrell compromised heterosexual norms and resisted `adult' conventions of emotional restraint" and also rules out the "psychoanalytic questions about gender and identity" that are central to an understanding of Jarrell's life and work (394-95). Jarrell's Complete Poems, unlike Pritchard's selection allows us "to recognize that Jarrell's poetry questions the normative criteria of power, clarity, and unity by which Jarrell himself tended to judge poems" (396). What Pritchard's Jarrell glosses over is that Jarrell, like the narrator of his novel, Pictures from an Institution, is "a living--still living--contradiction" (173). In short, Pritchard's account goes to great lengths to deny Jarrell's postmodernism, which has its roots in his complex relationship with what Hammer identifies as "the substantial institutional power" (397) of his Agrarian mentors.

The publication in 1940 of the New Directions anthology Five Young American Poets marked Jarrell's debut in book form (along with John Berryman, Mary Barnard, W.R. Moses, and George Marion O'Donnell). Jarrell balked at James Laughlin's request for a preface to introduce his poetry, saying, "I think I'll wait until I have a few hundred pages before I tell the world what I think about poetry" (Letters 25). Nevertheless, at Laughlin's insistence, Jarrell did compose his "Note on Poetry." While the other poets, including Berryman, focused on matters of craft, poetic form, and, in O'Donnell's case, "the Southern tradition," ⁽²⁾ Jarrell offered an outline of his few-hundred-pages argument in his 6 page preface, offering the then-remarkable thesis that "`Modern' poetry is, essentially, an extension of romanticism" (Five 86). The preface (along with its later expanded version, which appeared in the Nation in 1942 as "The End of the Line") formulated a provocative and heretical revisionist view of the high modernism of "Pound, Eliot, Crane, Tate, Stevens, Cummings, Marianne Moore, and so on" (Five 85). In many ways the essay was a pointed and political dissent from the New Criticism in process, formulated by Jarrell's Agrarian mentors, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and Donald Davidson.

Jarrell's Marxist orientation in these early essays surely comes as a surprise to those who depend on Pritchard's literary life, but a recovery of Jarrell's work in the thirties shows that orientation unmistakably. Though Pritchard insists that the young poet-critic had only "loose, quasi-Marxist-Freudian inclinations" (48), Jarrell's account of modernism as "The End of the Line" is explicitly dialectical and grounded in economics:

If you consider [modernism] as an end-product, a limit, in most cases a reductio ad absurdum, of a long historical process what will puzzle you is why it didn't happen sooner. (That is, as early as it did in France: Rimbaud wrote "modern" poetry. The causes are mostly economic, I think: France didn't have the Victorian prosperity which slowed up the whole series of changes in England; also the rate of change could be greater because romanticism was more of a surface phenomenon there.) When I say historical process I use it in the full sense of the word, I don't mean literary-historical; without the economic and scientific and political changes that accompany--and mostly cause--the changes in the poetry itself, the history of English poetry is nothing but a magician's catalogue. (Five 85-86)

Among the "great many factors that help conceal" the belated romanticism of modernism, Jarrell identifies "the best modern criticism of poetry" which "is extremely anti-romantic" noting that "the change in theory covers up the lack of any essential change in practice" (Five 87). In the revised version, Jarrell is even more explicitly political, mentioning "England's industrial advantages and enormous colonial profits" and its "complacent mercantile Christianity" in his revision of this passage. ⁽³⁾ "How could anyone fail to realize," Jarrell asks, "that the excesses of modernist poetry are the necessary concomitant of the excesses of late-capitalist society?" (Kipling 78, 82).

Both Jerome Mazzaro and James Longenbach have argued that "Jarrell was the first person to use the term `postmodern' in a literary context" in his 1947 review of Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle (Longenbach 469). ⁽⁴⁾ But John Crowe Ransom applied the term to Jarrell's thirties' poems in The Kenyon Review in 1941. Responding sardonically to Jarrell's wish to "write[] the kind of poetry that replaces modernism" (Five 90), Ransom takes his former student to task, one suspects, as much for his critical preface as for the weaknesses he detects in the poems:

In the prose conclusion [of "A Note on Poetry"], as in the poetic sequel, Jarrell forbids us to say yet that he is a post-modernist. But probably he will be. It is self-consciousness which stops the young poets from their own graces; too much thinking about all the technical possibilities at once, as well as too much attention to changes in fashion. ("Constellation" 378-379)

Below the surface of Jarrell's broad political and historical narrative, then, was his need to declare his independence from the Agrarian mentors who had made his reputation as a "young American poet." Nearly all of Jarrell's publication in the thirties was indebted to the sponsorship of Ransom, Tate, Warren, or Cleanth Brooks, but as their memoirs and letters reveal, they considered Jarrell an "enfant terrible" (Ransom, "Rugged" 155). Tate, who never forgave Jarrell after their falling out, characterized him privately as "a gifted self-adulating little twerp" (qtd. in Pritchard 67). Publicly, Tate seems to have been disappointed that "Jarrell would have none of the Fugitive tradition. . . . Our highfalutin talk about the Southern tradition left Randall cold" (Tate, "Young Randall 231). Tate had sponsored Jarrell's professional poetic debut by publishing five of his poems in the May 1934 poetry supplement of The American Review, a journal that, as Louise Cowan notes, was the primary organ for "the Agrarian `incarnation' of the Fugitive group" (14) and the breeding ground for the New Criticism. Jarrell's "Five Poems" lead off the poetry portion of the supplement which includes Warren, Davidson, John Gould Fletcher, John Peale Bishop, Mark Van Doren, Louis MacNeice, and Ransom. Preceding the poems are critical essays by Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and Warren. Ransom's piece, "Poetry: A Note in Ontology," (later collected in The World's Body) with its dismissal of "the hateful poetry of the Victorians," its assertion that "the critic who likes Victorian verse . . . is not quite capable of ontological perception" (173), and its ultimate valorization of metaphysical poetry (187-200), is typical of the anti-romantic criticism Jarrell mentions in "A Note on Poetry."

Jarrell's "Five Poems," which I think are clearly intended as a poetic sequence, echo Auden stylistically ("the only poet," Jarrell's "Note" claims, whose work represents "a departure from modernist romanticism" [89]), ⁽⁵⁾ and their subject matter seems romantic in a way that runs counter to Ransom's anti-romantic criticism. Though prominently displayed, they seem out of place amid the supplement's critical and poetic obsession with symbol and conceit. In these poems we can detect early evidence of Jarrell's lifelong alliance with the child, the feminine, and the disempowered against the state--"That dreaming and inhuman world" in which the potentially redemptive "child's words, swollen with weakness and pain" are "unfed and in the end betrayed, / Sucked hollow" (228-29). The speaker of the poems engages in a somewhat hermetic but ultimately pessimistic attempt to recapture the Wordsworthian fear of his childhood. The speaker attempts to summon "the inhabitants of the country of the mind" and "the thirsty images of a dream" "once more from memory" to "make" the reader (figured as an antagonistic "stuffed father") recognize a self "repeated in the shaking lights / The child hangs sprawling in his vacant sky" (228). Amid the "corrupt and fading flowers / of . . . bitter wit and sore content" (230), the speaker calls up the "forgotten virtues" of childhood in order to restore to the landscape its "true living forms" (231). The following year, Jarrell continued these Wordsworthian themes in the first issue of Brooks and Warren's The Southern Review with "And did she dwell in innocence and joy" and "Looking back in my mind I can see" (the latter poem, heavily revised, was included in The Woman at the Washington Zoo as "The Elementary Scene").

Of the seven earliest poems published by Tate, Brooks, or Warren, however, none would find their way into "The Rage for the Lost Penny." The twenty poems Jarrell selected from his thirties' work at the end of the decade omits this romantic strain, as if by design, in favor of a more political sequence. Ransom's view of the collection as a poetic sequel to the prose essay, then, seems astute. As the first poem, "On the Railway Platform," suggests, ⁽⁶⁾ the speaker of these poems is departing on a journey that will end in "No destinations we meant." Early in the volume, the false promises of romantic love, childhood, and fairy tales are rejected as the speaker's journey proves to be one toward the unintended destination of the emigrant's estrangement, culminating in Marx's distinction between "understanding" and "change." The narrative sequence omits the early poems that might be seen as sentimental and the poems early in the sequence depict the inefficacy of Romantic individualism in the face of "the world" and its "accessories" (97). The sequence, then, moves from hermetic peronal angst toward broader and more generalized indictments of the effects of the state and capital, on victims like the 1939 emigrant to America addressed in "For an Emigrant" (1939) whose "westering soul / Finds Europe waiting for it over every sea" ("Rage" 122). The "freedom" that the emigrant finds in America amounts to freedom "to be homeless, to be friendless, to be nameless, / To stammer the hard words in the frozen night" (121). The speaker exhorts the 1939 emigrant to escape from "the America where each / Can think still, 'I am innocent'" and urges her to reject forgiveness, understanding, and blame in favor of "change."

Jarrell's omission of the personal lament in favor of the political one is paradoxical. Stylistically, it served to please his Agrarian mentors, themselves obsessed with grand pronouncements about history and the decline of western (and Southern) civilization. And Jarrell's Marxist orientation, abstracted as it was in the poems, was at times indistinguishable from the reactionary orientation of Allen Tate. At any rate, he was quickly coming to accept their aesthetic, if not their politics. By 1941, in an essay on "Contemporary Poetry Criticism" published in the New Republic Jarrell could write

It is an odd fact that most good criticism of poetry today is being written by critics who can only be called--who call themselves--reactionary. (The best leftist critics of poetry, men like Edmund Wilson and Kenneth Burke, have gone over almost entirely to general criticism.) But neglecting criticism because we are annoyed at the critic's politics (or tone or style or anything else) is a fool's game; if we can learn nothing at all from his political views--that is unlikely, but possible--we can simply disregard them, and have that much more time for criticism. (Kipling 63)

Though we need not dwell on the naivete of this passage, in retrospect it may explain how a poem like "The Winter's Tale" could appear in the first issue ofThe Kenyon Review. Pritchard reserves his highest opprobrium for the poem (omitting it from his index as well, surely a Freudian forgetting): "the earliest [issue of The Kenyon Review] contained perhaps [Jarrell's] most grandiose poem, "The Winter's Tale," an exercise in the apocalyptic mode that ends with a line announcing `The fall of the western hegemonies'" (53). But certainly Ransom as editor must have been drawn to this grandiosity (of the sort he must have admired in Tate) enough to have overlooked the poem's political content:

We who have possessed the world

As efficiently as a new virus; who classified the races,

Species, and cultures of the world as scrub

To be cleared, stupidity to be liquidated, matter

To be assimilated into the system of our destruction;

Are finding how quickly the resistance of our hosts

Is built up--can think, "Tomorrow we may be remembered

As a technologist's nightmare, the megalomaniacs

Who presented to posterity as their justification

The best armies that the world ever saw."

Who made virtue and poetry and understanding

The prohibited reserves of the experts, of workers

Specialized as the ant-soldier; and who turned from their difficult

Versions to the degenerate myth, the cruelties

So incredible and habitual they seemed escapes. (58)

Though the aversion to the "technologist's nightmare" might be of a piece with an Agrarian conservatism, one detects here a criticism of their racism and cultural elitism which, after all, did much to make poetry a prohibited reserve of the expert. The resistant hosts to the new virus of the elite possessors of the world are those workers and races dismissed as "scrub"; "Specialized / As the ant-soldier," they are ruthlessly oppressed by the transformation of specific and "difficult / Versions" of history into "degenerate myths." But the speaker himself has been transformed: the possibilities for action seem circumscribed, and there seems no way for him to get beyond modernist alienation. The exhortation to "Change, then" at the end of the "Rage" sequence is rendered hollow by the condition of estrangement: the ignorantly innocent America, after it kills her, will look at the emigrant "And cry--`You stranger, you damned stranger!'" (123).

In a sense, Jarrell unwittingly buys into the "degenerate myths" by rejecting the specificity of political action in favor of existential guilt. His own elitism and egocentrism, as well as the literary favors of his mentors, caused him to condescend to the specific activism of other leftist poets of his generation. Though he never wrote about the specific volumes, it is clear that Jarrell had no patience with the left-activist, postmodernist collage of Rukeyser's Theory of Flight(1935) or "The Book of the Dead" in U.S. 1 (1938). Reviewing her third book, A Turning Wind (1939) in 1940, Jarrell called "Miss Rukeyser's poems . . . full of gratuitous disorganization and obscurity, lapses in taste, hit-or-miss symbolism, muddy intensity" (Kipling 35). To a contemporary reader, however, Jarrell's "The Winter's Tale" is full of muddy intensity, particularly placed beside the impassioned specificity of Rukeyser's work in the thirties, which encompasses the Scottsboro trials and Union Carbide's Gauley Bridge disaster. ⁽⁷⁾ Still, he was much kinder to Rukeyser at the end of the thirties than he would be near the end of the forties. Appropriating the rhetoric of William Phillips and Phillip Rahv and Delmore Schwartz in The Partisan Review , who had called Rukeyser a "poster girl who rode the bandwagon of proletarian literature" (qtd. in Kalaidjian 67), Jarrell launched his own sexist attack on Rukeyser's work. Denouncing her as the "Common Woman of our century, a siren photographed in a sequin bathing suit, on rocks like boiled potatoes, for the weekend edition of PM, in order to bring sex to the deserving poor" (Poetry 166), Jarrell quips that "One feels about most of her poems as one feels about the girl on last year's calendar" (163).

Walter Kalaidjian has argued persuasively that the negative reception of Rukeyser's Depression-era work by critics on both the left and the right was a product of anti-feminism on both sides, as well as the "equally ideal and totalizing arguments" of "orthodox Marxism and bourgeois humanism" (69, 71). For Jarrell, at the end of the thirties, an acceptance of the universalizing aesthetic of the New Criticism had indeed brought him to "the end of the line." Still to come were the poems about the war and, ultimately, his neoromantic version of postmodernism culminating in The Lost World poems. Having formulated the need for a postmodern poetics in the shadow of the New Critics, he was unable in his youth to "write[] the kind of poetry that replaces modernism," or to recognize in poets like Rukeyser, that it was already being written.

Notes

1. 1. See my study, Randall Jarrell and the Lost World of Childhood.

2. 2. O'Donnell was Jarrell's main rival at Vanderbilt, and, unlike Jarrell, he appears to have found the Agrarian politics of Ransom, Tate and Donald Davidson congenial. Jarrell rather tactlessly sniped at O'Donnell in his correspondence with Tate, insisting that his personal animosity toward O'Donnell had nothing to do with his negative literary judgment of O'Donnell's poetry (Cf. Letters 22, 29-32).

3. 3. Writing to Edmund Wilson in October 1941, Jarrell included a carbon copy of "The End of the Line," and noted that "The theory . . . is, implicitly, so heavily Marxist that I tried to make the surface neutral; I don't know whether I succeeded" (Letters 56).

4. 4. See also Mazzaro viii.

5. 5. Jarrell was not permitted to write his master's thesis on Auden as he had wished. Under the direction of Donald Davidson, he decided instead on A.E. Housman.

6. 6. Jarrell wrote to Amy Breyer (his first love) that the poem was agreeing with her reading of the poem as being about their estrangement after he went to Kenyon College (see Wright 225); positioned as it is in the volume, the poem, with its description of leave-takings resonates beyond the merely personal.

7. 7. Jarrell's brief review does not mention the "Lives" section of A Turning Wind, the first poems to appear in Rukeyser's fine series of biographical poems.

Works Cited

Cowan, Louise. The Southern Critics: An Introduction to the Criticism of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and Andrew Lytle. Irving, TX: U of Dallas P, 1972.

Five Young American Poets: Mary Barnard, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, W.R. Moses, George Marion O'Donnell. Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1940.

Flynn, Richard. Randall Jarrell and the Lost World of Childhood. Athens: U Georgia P, 1990.

Hammer, Langdon. "Who Was Randall Jarrell?" Yale Review 79 (1990): 389-405.

Jarrell, Randall. The Complete Poems. New York: Farrar, 1969.

---. "The End of the Line." In Kipling Auden & Co.: 76-83. Reprinted from The Nation, February 23, 1942.

---. "Five Poems." American Review 3 (May 1934): 228-231.

---. Kipling, Auden & Co. New York: Farrar, 1980.

---. "A Note on Poetry." In Five Young American Poets: 85-90. Reprinted in Kipling, Auden & Co.: 47-51.

---. Pictures from an Institution. New York: Knopf, 1954.

---. Poetry and the Age. New York: Knopf, 1953.

---. "The Rage for the Lost Penny." In Five Young American Poets: 81-123.

---. Randall Jarrell's Letters: An Autobiographical and Literary Selection. Edited by Mary Jarrell. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1985.

---. "The Winter's Tale." The Kenyon Review 1 (1938): 57-59.

Kalaidjian, Walter. "Muriel Rukeyser and the Poetics of Specific Critique: Rereading `The Book of the Dead.'" Cultural Critique 20 (Winter 1991-92): 65-88.

Longenbach, James. "Elizabeth Bishop and the Story of Postmodernism." Southern Review (NS) (1992): 469-484.

Mazzaro, Jerome. Postmodern American Poetry. Urbana: U Illinois P, 1980.

Pritchard, William. Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life. New York: Farrar, 1990.

Ransom, John Crowe. "Constellation of Five Young Poets." The Kenyon Review 3 (1941): 377-380.

---. "Poetry: A Note in Ontology." American Review 3 (May 1934): 172-200.

---. "The Rugged Way of Genius." In Lowell, et al. eds. Randall Jarrell: 1914-1965. New York: Farrar, 1967: 155-181.

Tate, Allen. "Young Randall." In Lowell, et al. eds. Randall Jarrell: 1914-1965. New York: Farrar, 1967: 230-232.

Wright, Stuart. Randall Jarrell: A Descriptive Bibliography, 1929-1983. Charlottesville: U P of Virginia, 1986.