''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
foreword
Randall 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completed his proposed book on Auden, these previously unpublished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.
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