Poetry and the Age was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1953. It established Jarrell as the finest American poetry critic of his generation — a judgment that has not been seriously challenged in the seventy years since. The book is not academic criticism (Jarrell despised academic writing about poetry, which he considered a form of murder) but passionate, personal engagement: a critic who loves poems explaining to readers why they should love them too, and explaining — with equal passion — why certain reputations are fraudulent.
The essays on Frost are revelatory: Jarrell demonstrated, against the prevailing view of Frost as a folksy New England moralist, that he was a poet of darkness, terror, and philosophical despair — “one of the subtlest and saddest of poets.” The essay on Whitman (“Some Lines from Whitman”) is a sustained act of quotation — Jarrell simply presents line after line of Whitman’s poetry, trusting that seeing the lines clearly is sufficient argument for their greatness. The essay on Marianne Moore is an exercise in precise technical appreciation: showing exactly how her poems work, what their prosodic innovations achieve, why their apparent oddity is in fact perfect rightness.
The negative criticism is equally brilliant: Jarrell’s one-line demolitions of mediocre poets are legendary in literary circles. “His verse, which occasionally has the accent of poetry, is generally indistinguishable from the kind of prose that the editors of most magazines would be embarrassed to print.” His standard for judgment is simple: does the poem sound like a human being actually feeling and thinking, or does it sound like a poet performing the act of writing a poem?
Collecting Poetry and the Age
First edition (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1953): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $50–$150
- Signed first edition: $150–$400
- Without jacket: $10–$25
The single finest book of American poetry criticism. Essential for any collection of mid-century American literature or literary criticism.