Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Jarrell's verse seems against the American grain, he also possessed the American male's obsession with practical detail, the ritual and vocabulary of a job. His common man's delight in the way things work gave him a great technical advantage over his brother poets. This is especially notable in his war poems. Jarrell, a washed-out pilot (too old), was a dedicated pilot instructor. He wrote about war, says Poet Karl Shapiro, not as other poets "sweating out the war in uniform," but as a participant, armed with military expertise...
...generous tribute, Robert Lowell called Jarrell "a Wordsworth with the obsessions of Lewis Carroll." He focused his poet's eye on a central moral problem of the age, which might be called the Eichmann syndrome, and expressed it in bitter doggerel...
Gold in Sea Water. In addition to poetry (four volumes), Jarrell was probably the best poet-critic since T.S. Eliot, as his critical volume, Poetry and the Age, attests. He rejected what Poet Shapiro calls "Eliot's High Church voice" in favor of "plain American, which dogs and cats can read." He demanded plain speech and uttered it. Thus his heroes were homespun Wordsworth, unfashionable Kipling, Thomas Hardy, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost and, of course, the greatest American poet to speak for the common man-Walt Whitman...
John Crowe Ransom says that Jarrell wore a "triple crown"-"a pure Pity, an embracing Weltschmerz, and a wry ironic Wit." The pity sometimes seemed absent from his own reviews. Alfred Kazin recalls a sideswipe in which Jarrell wrote that some crypto poet's work had "hidden treasures," but that finding them was "like looking for the gold in sea water." This sort of wit provided the sparkle to his otherwise brackish novel, Pictures from an Institution...
Handsome, small, competitive, Jarrell was savage to the false in art; yet he spoke to his own students, in the words of Poet Robert Watson, "as if they were potential Homers." Berryman recalls the "black wit" and "cruelty" of his criticism, yet he was personally kind. Lowell himself acknowledges a debt to Jarrell, who "twice or thrice must have thrown me a lifeline...