Randall Jarrell on Bad Poets

Apropos of our discussion of inaugural poems in a recent post ("A Few Thoughts on the Inauguration"), I thought I'd quote an excerpt from Randall Jarrell's essay, "Bad Poets". First, for those who are unfamiliar with his name, Randall Jarrell was literary critic and poet who is probably most widely known for writing this poem:

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

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.

For context, pictured above is the ball turret of a B-17 Flying Fortress¹.

Below is an excerpt from Jarrell's essay on bad poets:

[I]t is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with "This is a poem" scrawled on them in lipstick. After a while one is embarrassed not so much for them as for poetry, which is for these poor poets one more of the openings against which everyone in the end beats his brains out; and one finds it unbearable that poetry should be so hard to write - a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey in which there is for most of the players no tail, no donkey, not even a booby prize. If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Gödel believes Leibnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and systematically converting into poetry what we see and feel and are!

[...]

It would be a hard heart and a dull head that could condemn, except with a sort of sacred awe, such poets² for anything that they have done - or rather, for anything that has been done to them: for they have never made anything, they have suffered their poetry as helplessly as they have anything else; so that it is neither the imitation of life nor a slice of life but life itself - beyond good, beyond evil, and certainly beyond reviewing.

¹This photo comes from the website of Britain's Imperial War Museum.

²Elizabeth Alexander, who recited (in a manner fitting for toddlers) her awful poem at Obama's inauguration, doesn't fit into this category of amateur poets guilelessly mailing in samples of their bad poetry; as a professional poet inflicting bad verse on the nation she is worthy of condemnation.

A Few Thoughts on the Inauguration

- The way that Barack Obama and George W. Bush have interacted with each other since Election Day has been gracious and classy. The Inauguration was no exception, with President Obama thanking former President Bush for his service, and the men embracing twice (after President Obama's address, pictured above, and as the Obamas accompanied the Bushes to the Marine helicopter for the Bushes' flight to Andrews Air Force Base).

- Obama's rhetoric about "responsibility", "tough decisions", and "shared sacrifice" was a noteworthy. One wonders to what policies Obama was alluding. Cost-saving reforms of entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security? A long shot, perhaps, but it's hard to imagine a President coming into office with more political capital or goodwill. Perhaps Obama will choose to spend some of that on entitlement reform. Reforms that restrain the growth of the government's unfunded entitlement liabilities -- even reforms not scheduled to take effect for several years -- could help assuage the bond market's concerns and maintain the demand for U.S Treasury securities (the supply of which will of course expand over the next few years, as we finance trillion dollar+ deficits).

- Another awful inaugural poem. This was the fourth time an inauguration has featured an inaugural poem, and Elizabeth Alexander delivered the third clunker in a row with her "Praise Song for the Day". As a nation, we are now 1-for-4 on inaugural poems, by my estimation. The only good one was the first, The Gift Outright¹, by Robert Frost, recited at JFK's inauguration in 1961:

The Gift Outright

The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England's, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

¹Frost had actually written another poem for the occasion, but in the sunlight of inauguration day wasn't able to read his text. So he recited his poem The Gift Outright from memory.