[Poetry and the Age] is, I believe, the most original and best book on its subject since The Double Agent by R. P. Blackmur and Primitivism and Decadence by Yvor Winters…. It does not, indeed, contain [Jarrell's] most plunging criticism so far, which will be found in his articles and reviews and lectures on Auden, whose mind Jarrell understands better than anyone ought to be allowed to understand anyone else's, especially anyone so pleasant and destructive as Jarrell; these will make another volume. But it exhibits fully the qualities that made Jarrell the most powerful reviewer of poetry active in this country for the last decade; and in its chief triumphs, the second essay on Frost and the first review of Lowell (I mean the first of the two here preserved) it exhibits more.

William Empson I suppose was Jarrell's master…. His prose is not so manly as...