Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden (A Columbia University Publication) [Hardcover]

Stephen Burt (Editor), Hannah Brooks-Motl (Assistant)

Book Description

Series: A Columbia University Publication | Publication Date: May 4, 2005

''To read Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden is to read the best-equipped of American critics of poetry of the past century on the best-equipped of its Anglo-American poets, and we rush to read, perhaps, less out of an academic interest in fair judgment than out of a spectator's love of virtuosity in flight.'' From Adam Gopnik's foreword

Randall Jarrell was one of the most important poet-critics of the past century, and the poet who most fascinated and infuriated him was W. H. Auden. In Auden, Jarrell found a crucial poetic influence that needed to be both embraced and resisted. During the 1940s, Jarrell wrestled with Auden's work, writing a series of notorious articles on Auden that remain admired and controversial examples of devoted and contentious criticism. While Jarrell never completed his proposed book on Auden, these previously unpublished lectures revise and reprise his earlier articles and present new insights into Auden's work. Delivered at Princeton University in 1951 and 1952, Jarrell's lectures reflect a passionate appreciation of Auden's work, a witty attack from an informed opponent, and an important document of a major poet's reception.

Jarrell's lectures offer readings of many of Auden's works, including all of his long poems, and illuminate his singular use of a variety of stylistic registers and poetic genres. In the lecture based on the article ''Freud to Paul,'' Jarrell traces the ideas and ideologies that animated and, at times, overwhelmed Auden's poetry. More precisely, he considers the influence of left-liberal politics, psychoanalytic and evolutionary theory, and the idiosyncratic Christian theology that characterized Auden's poems of the 1940s.

While an admiring and sympathetic reader, Jarrell does not avoid identifying Auden's poetic failures and political excesses. He offers occasionally blistering assessments of individual poems and laments Auden's turn from a cryptic, feeling, impassioned poet to a rhetorical, self-conscious one. Stephen Burt's introduction provides a backdrop to the lectures and their reception and importance for the history of modern poetry.

(8/1/05)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Randall Jarrell wrote one of the major mid-20th-century works of poetry criticism (Poetry and the Age, 1953); Burt wrote the major 21st-century study (so far) of Randall Jarrell (Randall Jarrell and His Age, 2002). In his introduction to this set of six lectures, which Jarrell delivered at Princeton in 1952, Burt establishes the key, if contentious, role W.H. Auden's work played in Jarrell's own development as a poet and critic. As New Yorker writer Adam Gopnick points out in his foreword, Jarrell's lectures present an "almost comically detailed analysis of the transformation of Auden's rhetoric in the 1940s," a crux period in Auden's career-he had emigrated to the United States from England a few years earlier, and in that time he had come to abjure the "We must love one another or die" sentiments of "September 1st, 1939," which he composed almost immediately after his arrival. Gopnick finds the essays to be "a cutting contest without cuts, an occasion of witticisms more than a battle of wits." Indeed, Jarrell does seem to be trying to best the older (and more famous) poet at the same time that he is lavishing attention on his smallest rhetorical shifts-and working hard to impress the audience as he sings for his supper (Burt details the financial arrangements). Jarrell registers multiple complaints about Auden's seeming "liberal pieties" (as Gopnick calls them, though he does not think them such) and the taming effect they have had on his verse. Despite the ambivalence evident throughout the lectures, it is clear that Jarrell thought Auden worth reading to the dregs. The number of people today who have read Auden's poetry of the 1940s is smaller than the work merits, and the same goes for Jarrell's poetry and criticism throughout his career. This set of critical engagements, published here for the first time, allows one to start right in the middle of two mid-century titans.
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Review

W. H. Auden's debut as a poet, in 1928, was the most prodigious since Byron's. When he arrived on the American scene in 1939, he continued to dazzle readers in this country--none more so than Randall Jarrell, who had been reading and admiring him from the start. Auden's triumphal march across the next decade, though, began to disconcert Jarrell, and these Princeton lectures are the record of his mixed feelings. His readings are bracing, and his conclusions misjudged, but where else will one encounter a major poet so intimately engaged with the work of another? We're told that, informed of Jarrell's attacks. Auden merely shrugged, "I think Jarrell must be in love with me," and in a crucial sense he was right.

(J. D. McClatchy Yale Review 2/21/05)

This set of critical engagements, published here for the first time, allows one to start right in the middle of two mid-century titans.

(Publishers Weekly )

This collection is first-rate scholarship... Jarrell is more than a virtuoso performing here.

(Jon Tribble Washington Post Book World )

Jarrell was enthralled, dazzled and infuriated by Auden... and these lectures... encompass both his admiration and his reservation.

(London Review of Books )

This volume may be slim, but it is substantial, a happy addition to Jarrell's criticism.

(Magill Book Reviews )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 200 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press; First Edition edition (May 4, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231130783
• ISBN-13: 978-0231130783
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,128,688 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)