Randall Jarrell Critical Essay | Lecture by Randall Jarrell

Lecture by Randall Jarrell

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...
(read more)