Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden (A Columbia University Publication) by Stephanie Burt (PDF)

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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 forewordRandall 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 While Jarrell never completed his proposed book on Auden, these previously unpublished lectures revise and reprise his earlier articles and present new insights into Auden’s work.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.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This 136 page series of lectures, a bravura treatment of a poet’s work which has yet to be deciphered fully (delivered at Princeton University in 1952-53) is interesting because it is a provocative close reading of a poet by a poet (and critic). Jarrell’s lectures, addressed to an invited audience, assume we (they) have read Auden and that we now his work well. As well as fixing the template with which subsequent critics and criticisms have approached the Auden oeuvre, in terms of dividing up the poet’s work into discrete parts, Jarrell’s encomium is a very readable take on a poet whose work he knew better than most. Jarrell’s comments are often provocative and even where he was wrong, and strong editing and a good Introduction shows where he was occasionally wrong (Auden’s use of rhetoric), anyone wishing for a look under the Auden bonnet (hood) to try to understand both what influenced the poet’s work and how he achieved certain effects, will find this book fascinating.The extensive notes on the Lectures themselves contain a mine of useful information. Beautifully produced (hardback) and well worth the price, it is both an assault and an homage to Auden and achieves what Auden is reported to have done when he was faced with a body of poetry, Jarrell attempts to decipher the codes that shape the work. Auden’s poetry forced and continues to force theory to expand its reach so it can accommodate him, not something that can be said of too many poets.Readers who are new to Auden might read the Cambridge Companion to WH~, 19 contemporary essays on most aspects of the poet. For those seeking an update on Jarrell’s lectures, find John R. Boly’s book, ‘Reading Auden, The Returns of Caliban’ or Rainer Emig’s book, ‘Towards a Postmodern Poetics’, both heavy on theory but these books completely changed my thinking on Auden and on the apparently innocent habit of reading. Bahlke’s earlier collected essays are interesting but were written before the poet’s work was more properly understood. Was it ever.

⭐

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