SOURCE: Travisano, Thomas. “Randall's Jarrell's Poetics: A Rediscovered Milestone.” Georgia Review 50, no. 4 (winter 1996): 691-96.

In the following essay, Travisano remarks on Jarrell's 1942 lecture “Levels and Opposites: Structure in Poetry” (first published in 1996), and discusses his status as a literary critic.

No ideas but in things.

—William Carlos Williams

There are no things in a poem, only processes.

—Randall Jarrell

For many readers today the name of Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) is associated most firmly with such haunting war poems as “Losses,” “Siegfried,” “Protocols,” and the oft-anthologized “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”—all of which appeared in his second published collection, Little Friend, Little Friend (1945). Indeed, when his close association with Robert Lowell and John Berryman recommenced in 1946, Jarrell's poetic reputation was far greater than those of his friends. As Lowell later acknowledged (leaving himself out of the equation), “Compared with other poets, John was a prodigy; compared with...