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PARTISAN REVIEW
writers represented by Twain-Lawrence, Faulkner, Dreiser, Anderson,
Norris, etc. among the novelists, and Whitman, Frost, W. C. Williams,
etc. among the poets. Not that these writers have lacked defenders or
even cults of their own, but that they have been sorely in need of the
wide-ranging, sober, affectionate, knowledgeable, histrionic consideration
that Mr. Jarrell gives to his favorite poets.
Mr. Schwartz's claim has force, though, only
if
we are modest in
making it. By giving amusingly short shrift to those parts of, say, Frost
which are also parts of the World, Mr. Jarrell brings out his virtues in
very high relief. He has a sixteenth-century woodcarver's faculty for this
kind of personification. On the other hand, Winters has written almost
as enthusiastically about Frost's great lyrics, although his selection is a
trifle narrower and he doesn't praise the dramatic monologues suffi–
ciently.
Good as it is, Jarrell's Whitman essay is incomplete, and I don't
mean merely in terms of literary-historical analysis. For example, in the
short lyric in "Out of the Cradle . . ." which begins "Shine, shine,
shine," Whitman is extraordinarily successful in this lapse into conven–
tional meter in concentrating and sublimating the themes of the poem
into a sort of apogee of American romantic lyricism.
It
seems to me,
merely in itself, one of the great lyric touchstones of American poetry.
But of course it shouldn't be read apart from the rest of the poem, al–
though its mere existence throws the diffuseness of the rest into a new
perspective, giving it point and "emotional form." Mr. Jarrell, however
much he may favor the taking of risks, is too nervous about this looser,
bardic, "public" diction in Whitman. He wants his poets to
be
largely
representative, but he is shy of their becoming involved with public
emotions. He wants his poets to be general but not
too
general, and this,
I think, is a limitation. Like Winters, but from an exactly opposite direc–
tion, he is reacting too strongly against the middlebrow cult.
To my mind, much his best writing is on Marianne Moore. Here
both poet and critic approach each other from such thoroughly special
and entrenched positions that they
do
meet across the best poems in
nearly every case. Miss Moore, unlike Whitman and Frost, is least suc–
cessful when she tries to be most representative.
One can also express doubts about the notion of Ransom as a
"daydream." In his special Ransomian way, Ransom is really every bit
as mordant and
agitato
as Tate and Warren. What a:bout "Equilibrists,"
"Two in August," or "Captain Carpenter"? It's a bantering, mock–
melodramatic, rhetorical, "open" convention, but it's certainly not pure
sweetness and light. And in what sense are "Ode to the Confederate
