Poetry and the Age

by Jarrell, Randall

• ISBN13: 9780813021089
• ISBN10: 0813021081
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-05-01
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Florida

Summary

Randall Jarrell was the critic whose taste defined American poetry after World War II. Poetry and the Age, his first collection of criticism, was published in 1953. It has been in and out of print over the past 40 years and has become a classic of American letters. In this new edition, two long-lost lectures by Jarrell have been added. Recently discovered by critics, they speak to issues at the heart of Jarrell's criticism: the structure of poetry and the question "Is American poetry American?"

One of the outstanding poets of the postwar generation, Jarrell was also celebrated for his extraordinary praise of some underappreciated older and younger poets and for his witty dismissals of current favorites he thought less qualified. Poetry and the Age includes groundbreaking considerations of Walt Whitman and Robert Frost as well as profound appraisals of Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, John Crowe Ransom, and William Carlos Williams. His early reviews that established the reputations of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop are here, beside other enthusiastic disco

Table of Contents

Introduction	xi
William Logan
Preface	xxi
The Obscurity of the Poet	3	(25)
Two Essays on Robert Frost	28	(42)
The Other Frost	28	(9)
To the Loodiceans	37	(33)
The Age of Criticism	70	(26)
John Ransom's Poetry	96	(16)
Some Lines from Whitman	112	(21)
Reflections on Wallace Stevens	133	(16)
A Verse Chronicle	149	(30)
Walter de la Mare	149	(5)
Alex Comfort	154	(4)
Tristan Corbiere	158	(5)
Muriel Rukeyser	163	(3)
R. P. Blackmur	166	(4)
Anthologies	170	(6)
Bad Poets	176	(3)
Two Essays on Marianne Moore	179	(29)
The Humble Animal	179	(6)
Her Shield	185	(23)
From the Kingdom of Necessity	208	(12)
Poets	220	(30)
An Introduction to the
Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams	237	(13)
Three Books	250	(16)
The Situation of a Poet	266	(6)
Levels and Opposites: Structure in Poetry	272	(23)
``Is American Poetry American?''	295