Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden. Edited by stephenburt, with hannah brooks-motl. Pp. xvi+178. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. £22·50.

In a well-known article called ‘What's Become of Wystan?’, Philip Larkin argued in 1960 that although Auden's poetic life had lasted for thirty years, ‘almost all we value is still confined to its first ten years’. The American Auden was ‘too verbose to be memorable and too intellectual to be moving’. Several years earlier, in six lectures delivered at Princeton University in 1951 and 1952, Randall Jarrell provided the same argument, although in a slightly different tone. In his foreword to Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden, Adam Gopnik says that ‘Philip Larkin's “attack” on the same Auden poems is fairly called one, and though one laughs at Larkin's jokes, because they are good, and values his direct, terse hatred of fancy speech, still there is something distasteful in Larkin's words on Auden’, but ‘with Jarrell on Auden one feels less in the presence of an unjust judgment than of a strange obsessive pleading’ (p. viii).

Jarrell prefers the earlier Auden, the English Auden. In the introduction, Stephen Burt notes that Jarrell himself said that he was ‘never influenced by the Auden he admired most, the mysterious, dense, and intuitive poet of Poems (1930) and Paid on Both Sides’, but ‘Jarrell's early poems often sound instead like the Auden of On This Island (1935)’ (p. 2). (Being an American book, it uses, rather than Look, Stranger!, the American title, On This Island, for the collection that was published in America in 1937 not 1935.) Jarrell says that the early poems often give the impression that ‘they have been produced by Auden's whole being’ (p. 59), but ‘Auden's later method is willed, produced at will, willful’ (p. 60). Jarrell has a particular dislike for the rhetoric he sees in the poetry that Auden wrote in America, although ‘he has begun to get better again’ (p. 73).

Jarrell tries to be funny, like Larkin, but his jokes don't always work. For instance, some passages of For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio have ‘an astonishing bounce and lift’, so Jarrell says ‘I think he should have used Heigh ho, heigh ho, it's off to work we go (sung in the Seven Dwarfs’ cheerfulest tones) as an epigraph for the piece’ (p. 130). Some of his remarks hover between jokes and serious comments so that one cannot be entirely sure that he really means what he says: this is the case with his remark that The Orators ‘has by now all the charm of a period piece, and many of the worst things in it are as delightful as some eighteenth-century ode beginning, Inoculation, heavenly Maid! ’ (p. 126).

This book is not everything that Jarrell wrote on Auden, but Burt says that ‘Jarrell incorporated into these lectures parts of every piece of writing about Auden which he had published between 1941 and 1951’ (p. 14). Burt looks at ‘Changes of Attitude and Rhetoric in the Poetry of W. H. Auden’ (Southern Review, Autumn 1941) and ‘Freud to Paul: The Stages of Auden's Ideology’ (Partisan Review, Fall 1945). Burt's opinion is that ‘readers of Jarrell see in these writings an Oedipal struggle or the anxiety of influence: readers of Auden remember them as attacks’ (p. 5). Readers of Auden probably greatly outnumber readers of Jarrell, so one should refer to these writings as attacks. Indeed, it is hard to see Jarrell suffering from the anxiety of influence when Harold Bloom had only the greatest writers in mind when he came up with his book of that title, and while Auden can certainly be described as great, it is also hard to see Jarrell and Auden as ‘two virtuosi playing side by side: like Menuhin and Grapelli playing jazz standards’ (p. vii). Nonetheless, the book offers plenty not only for readers of Auden but also for readers of Jarrell. We are given insights into the mind of a poet–critic who would rather be writing poetry: working on the lectures in early October 1951, he wrote ‘I’m a poet, Mother, aren't I? I shouldn't be writing old criticism, should I?’ (p. 10). Perhaps his poet's dislike for prose can be detected in his attacks on Auden, whose ‘effective rhetorical use of abstraction often degenerated, in the poems he wrote during the late 1930s and the early 1940s, into the flatness and vagueness and deadness of a bad essay’ (p. 57). Indeed, Auden was a poet–critic too, and apparently that was his problem, because his poetry is criticism and his prose articles and reviews ‘are secondary commentaries or glosses on those primary commentaries or glosses which are his creative works’ (p. 89). Jarrell also occasionally criticizes Auden's reviewing, accusing one piece of journalism of being ‘moral and tactical absurdity’ (p. 108).

Unfortunately, there is no W. H. Auden on Randall Jarrell. Auden had met Jarrell and read his poetry, but he didn't attend these lectures. What we do have is Auden's reaction to Jarrell's criticisms: ‘one celebrated memoir has him telling Stephen Spender, “Jarrell is in love with me” ’ (p. 13). Another celebrated book, Humphrey Carpenter's biography of Auden, has a slightly different version of this remark (‘I think Jarrell must be in love with me’), but, either way, there could be some truth in it. As Adam Gopnik suggests, there is something a little strange and obsessive about Jarrell's extremes of opinion. Immediately before providing a long list of Auden's many virtues, he tears apart ‘Spain 1937’ line by line, even saying at one point that ‘words fail me—few men, few women, and few children have ever written anything as silly, as shamefully silly, as amazingly silly as this’ (p. 68).