SOURCE: Marcus, Mordecai, and Erin Marcus. “Jarrell's ‘The Emancipators’.” Explicator 16, no. 5 (February 1958): 26.

In the following essay, the critics elucidate the allusions, ironies, and balance of “hopefulness and utter despair” in Jarrell's poem “The Emancipators.”

In introducing his Selected Poems Randall Jarrell includes a brief note explaining that the first stanza of “The Emancipators” alludes to Galileo, Newton, and Bruno. But the title, details, and structure of the poem require much explication. Jarrell's first stanza alludes to specific men and acts, but the withholding of their names and, in the second stanza, the generalization about their scientific work characterize them as a group. The lenses, moons, and wanderer refer to Galileo's making a telescope and discovering several of Jupiter's moons. The description of the moons swimming free from the planet is not merely figurative, for when objects are first sighted in a telescope they appear to swim away from...