This section contains 6,264 words (approx. 21 pages at 300 words per page) |
SOURCE: Jarrell, Randall. “Levels and Opposites: Structure in Poetry.” Georgia Review 50, no. 4 (winter 1996): 697-713.
In the following excerpt, originally delivered as a lecture in 1942, Jarrell explains his aesthetics of poetic structure, emphasizing temporality, a struggle of opposites, and a dialectical tension of elements as the fundamental qualities of poetry.
I shall have to disregard the musical structure of poetry: metre, stanza-form, rhyme, alliteration, quantity, and so on. I neglect these without too much regret: criticism has paid them an altogether disproportionate amount of attention—partly, I suppose, because they are things any child can point at, draw diagrams of, and count. I am going to talk, primarily, about other sorts of structure in lyrical poetry.
We think of the structure of poetry too much in static terms; partly because twenty-five centuries have trained us to do that with everything, and partly because we are fooled by the poem's...
This section contains 6,264 words (approx. 21 pages at 300 words per page) |