My writing has been disrupted these past few months. I like to be very regular – one essay on religion, one on video games, alternating weeks. I’ve been doing that since 2022. But this year – I don’t think I’ve done a full month all year. And the topics haven’t been regular either. I’ve been working on the Horus Heresy essays, which break things up a little, and then in the last month I’ve really mostly written about Clive James. He was at the core of the Batman essay, in the essay about writing criticism online, and obviously in the most recent essay, ‘Clive James and the Myth of Progress’. On the religion side, we’ve barely moved past Bonhoeffer. I have not read as broadly as I would have liked – I mean, I’ve been reading probably more than usual, but it’s not what I intended. It’s not bad, it’s just different. It’s disrupted. I’m trying to lean in though, I guess. Let’s talk about poetry criticism.

Randall Jarrell was an early 20th century poet and literary critic. He was in the air force during the Second World War, he was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (a title now better known as Poet Laureate) from 1956 to 1958, and in 1965, after a deep depression and suicide attempt, he was hit by a car and killed. It’s maybe suspicious, given the existing mental health issues, but it was ruled accidental by the doctors, so here we are. Jarrell made his name reviewing poetry for The Nation and The New Republic. Poetry and the Age is his first collected book of criticism: published in 1953, it includes essays on Robert Frost, John Ransom, Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and more. It has a couple of his talks as well, including the Harvard lecture ‘The Obscurity of the Poet’, which opens: “When I was asked to talk about the Obscurity of the Modern Poet I was delighted, for I have suffered from this obscurity all my life.”

Within the collection, his essays with an argument are probably the more immediately accessible. ‘The Obscurity of the Poet’ argues that people mostly think modern poetry is difficult because they don’t read much poetry at all. “Similarly, when someone says, ‘I don’t read modern poetry because it’s all stuff that nobody on earth can understand,’ I know enough to be able to answer, though not aloud: ‘It isn’t; and even if it were, that’s not the reason you don’t read it.'” ‘The Age of Criticism’ in turn argues that too many people write criticism – that criticism, at least at the time, seemed to be taking over from the actual writing of poetry. Criticism should point towards poetry, Jarrell argues. It should only be a signpost directing you to each poem’s finer features. Something’s wrong when criticism becomes the main attraction.

It’s not surprising, given that argument, that most of Jarrell’s other essays here are close studies of different poets. They aren’t argument-driven, per se – they’re almost more like character studies. He tells you the vibe of the poet. In ‘To the Laodiceans’, an essay on Frost, Jarrell writes about Frost’s “stubborn truthfulness, his willingness to admit both the falseness in the cliche and the falseness in the contradiction of the cliche”. That sort of writing is fine if you want to get a sense of a poet’s personality, but it’s also sometimes difficult to evaluate the claim. Does Frost have a stubborn truthfulness? We get some evidence – Jarrell quotes Frost’s poem ‘The Most of It’ – but it’s more an observation than an argument. Observation has its place, but at the deepest end, it becomes almost unusable. In his essay on John Ransom, Jarrell tells us about Ransom’s greatest works. “It seems to me that Ransom’s best poems are ‘Captain Carpenter’, ‘Antique Harvesters’, ‘Painted Head’…” Jarrell lists in total twelve poems here, plus three more (“‘The Equilibrists’, ‘Necrological’, and ‘Armageddon'”, which are “elaborately mannered but fairly successful poems of an odd kind”), and then another three after that. He doesn’t give you the tools to evaluate his claim in the essay itself. He doesn’t give you examples or evidence. He just lists the names of eighteen poems and tells you they’re the best, or that they’re “good examples of Ransom’s microscopic successes”. If you don’t know Ransom’s poetry yourself, there’s no real way to make sense of it. It’s a list with no reference. It’s ProZD ranking Monopoly pieces by fuckability – meaningful to him, maybe, but not really to anyone who’s not real deep into Monopoly.

And it’s not that Jarrell ought to be justifying all of these choices. Making that argument in a systematic way would require so much work – you’d have to go over every poem and explain why you think it’s better or worse, where you think it fits into the writer’s oeuvre – it’s such a colossal task that it’s really best done behind the scenes. When you see a Selected Works for this poet or that, where someone’s pulled together a catalogue of maybe a couple dozen of their poems – that’s implicitly where those choices are normally made. Let me – maybe you’re not deep into poetry, but whenever there’s a new collection or Selected Works for a given poet, there are two types of readers. You’ve got the poetry nerds, who look at the selection and compare it against previous collections, and explore which poems have been left out or brought in. They look at how the collection has been constructed. Chronological? By theme? I actually saw a collected works of Mary Oliver recently, and the section headings were each of her books. You had a section for Dream Work, and a section for A Thousand Mornings and so on, and they each pulled maybe half a dozen poems from their respective book, and then the books were all ordered by date of publication. And standing in the bookshop I went hmm, that’s interesting, I don’t see that very often. That’s one type of reader. The other type just buys the book because they like the cover. You can see how curating a poetry collection is a similar process to what Jarrell is doing. The editor makes those same evaluative decisions. They include or exclude, they organise, select. They add in the poems they think are the best, or the most representative. The advantage over Jarrell is that in a collected works, you actually get to read the poems. It’s more accessible for that second type of reader.

Of course that’s not to say that Jarrell doesn’t give you the poems. He quotes them in swathes. Most of ‘To the Laodiceans’ is quoting different Robert Frost poems. At one point, he mentions three longer poems, and asks the reader to pretend he’s been able to quote them: “May I just make a bargain with the reader to regard them as quoted in this article?” The issue, to me, is more how he talks about them. He does recognise that his article doesn’t explore everything he discusses in its proper depth. In his words, his thirty-plus page essay is at best a “breathless signboard.” The introduction to this volume in front of me, written by William Logan, suggests that “Jarrell wrote a higher form of review rather than a lower form of literary criticism.” Logan continues, “His work is that of taste and judgement, rarely explanation”, and then he makes a snide comment about how explanations are for losers. But – just to roast Logan for a second – the guy uses brackets six times on this one page to make pithy comments. There are another eight across the next three pages after that. He knows that what he’s saying isn’t important to his argument, but he’s determined to waste your time by saying it anyway. The thing he’s right about – the thing he should be focusing on – is that Jarrell isn’t working in an explanatory mode. It’s all in terms of taste. It’s not invalid, per se, but it is different at least to how I was trained. When I went through, you didn’t make a claim without providing evidence. Frost’s stubborn truthfulness had better be cited at length. That’s ultimately, I think, more in line with Jarrell’s vision. If he wants criticism to point towards the text, critics have to justify their claims with specifics. Taste isn’t good enough: it’s more about the critic than the work at hand.