Randall Jarrell Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Frances Ferguson

Critical Essay by Frances Ferguson

If we hope to avoid simple thematizing of Jarrell's work, and also to get beyond the respectable (and even appropriate) confusions of most readings, then a useful point of departure lies in Jarrell's own critical writings. His essay "Stories," perhaps the most interesting prose piece he ever wrote, is remarkable primarily for its unwillingness to yield to any of the dead-ended perplexities and simplifications that are ever-present dangers in the act of reading. "Stories," more a short story masquerading as a commentary on one man's anthology of great stories than a straight-for-ward critical essay, serves to remind us that Jarrell was not a poet with his left hand, and a critic with his right; like all of Jarrell's best critical essays—the two on Frost and the later one on Wallace Stevens in particular—"Stories" eschews the two basic approaches that criticism on Jarrell has followed. For him, "talking about" literature involves...
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