The Complete Poems was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1969, four years after Jarrell’s death (he was struck by a car in 1965, almost certainly a suicide). The volume collects everything: the war poems of Little Friend, Little Friend (1945) and Losses (1948); the mature domestic work of The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960) and The Lost World (1965); and a selection of uncollected and posthumous poems.
Jarrell’s war poetry remains his most famous achievement. “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” — five lines, thirty-eight words — is the most widely anthologized American poem of World War II: “From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State, / And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. / Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, / I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. / When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.” The compression, the metaphorical density (birth = death, mother = State, womb = turret), and the devastating final line achieve in five lines what most war literature requires hundreds of pages.
But the later poems — less famous, more personal — reveal a different Jarrell: tender, melancholy, obsessed with childhood as a lost paradise and with the lives of women trapped in domestic routine. “Next Day” (spoken by a woman leaving a supermarket, contemplating her aging face), “The Woman at the Washington Zoo” (a government worker begging the animals for transformation), “Thinking of the Lost World” (memory as the only country one can return to) — these are poems of suburban American despair rendered with compassion rather than condescension.
Collecting The Complete Poems
First edition (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1969): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $30–$75
- Without jacket: $8–$15
- Individual earlier collections (first editions): $40–$200 depending on title
- Signed Jarrell items (any): $200–$500
The standard edition of a major American poet. Individual collections — particularly The Woman at the Washington Zoo (National Book Award winner) — command higher prices when found in fine condition.