SOURCE: Carruth, Hayden. Review of Losses, by Randall Jarrell. Poetry 72, no. 6 (September 1948): 307-11.

In the following review, Carruth responds to W. S. Graham's negative appraisal of Losses, vindicating Jarrell by attacking Graham's limited definition of poetry.

Here is another reviewer who tells us what is the stuff of poetry. It was tried before, I think, by Bruin of Colchester and, somewhat later, by Mgr. Polidore Flaquet.

Now it is time to question this kind of talk by Mr. Graham. It is time to challenge what Mr. Stephen Spender, a better-tempered Englishman who is also living at present in our monstrous country, recently deplored as “the denigration of American poetry as external by English writers.”

For the subjects of poetry cannot be limited. The lesson taught to us by Mr. Ezra Pound, Dr. William Carlos Williams, and Mr. T. S. Eliot cannot be soon forgotten. Poetry will be what...