- Paperback: 400 pages
- Publisher: Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (July 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0060956380
- ISBN-13: 978-0060956387
- Product Dimensions: 23.8 x 15.5 x 2.7 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,140,038 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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First Sentence
WHEN I WAS ASKED TO TALK about the Obscurity of the Modern Poet I was delighted, for I have suffered from this obscurity all my life. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
WHEN I WAS ASKED TO TALK about the Obscurity of the Modern Poet I was delighted, for I have suffered from this obscurity all my life. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
The reader from Zion does have some legitimate points to make--that late essay on Stevens is sorely missed, and perhaps Brad Leithauser has indeed weighted the collection too heavily towards Jarrell's lamentations on contemporary culture. Yet I still can't understand how anybody with an ear for English prose could complain about this delightful, witty, supernaturally wise collection. And the nitpicking about the book's "precious" production values is even nuttier--what did you want, a volume bound in corrugated cardboard? Until the Library of America wises up and devotes a book to Jarrell--and really, between Poetry and the Age, Kipling Auden & Company, and The Third Book of Criticism, there's PLENTY of material--this one will have to do. And it does, handsomely. Can we stop the griping, please?
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
The reader from St. Louis (below) must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed. I can't see anything so onerous about Randall Jarrell's splendid work being "Palgraved"--ie, anthologized. Sure, I might have made some different choices than Brad Leithauser did (for one thing, I would've omitted the more academic pieces about Auden and Housman), but only an insane person would actually object to reading the superb and sparkling prose in "No Other Book." And given the out-of-print status of the other titles, I'm grateful that this one is now readily available. Viva Jarrell!
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This book puts essays by an important American writer back into print, but it's a bad book. Beginning with the cover's silver lamella treatment but extending especially to the selection and the embarrassing introduction, there is no reason why the reprinting of this book should keep those interested in Jarrell from finding the three books of criticism for which the author himself was responsible. They're available on-line, and at good used book shops. In brief, Jarrell has been Palgraved by Brad Leithauser, who would take that remark as a compliment, because that's just the kind of legitimation he thinks Jarrell needs at this moment in history. But Jarrell is not "the best poetry critic of his generation" (or whatever it is Leithauser wants to claim)and he needn't be to justify keeping his interesting work in print. His editor, however, so concerned is he to settle scores against unnamed academics and other pooh-poohers of Jarrell's presumably unmistakeable authority, resorts to a kind of windy pastiche of Jarrell's critical style, slinging superlatives in every direction where there's no accountability (so, e.g., Jarrell's said to be unlike everyone, everyone, everyone!), with the nervous result that Jarrell looks just as aggressively stupid as his defender. At the same time, the selection of essays and their presentation makes no attempt to understand Jarrell's achievement and its regrettable limitations. It was Robert Duncan who said that Jarrell's criticism was "the attempt to successfully impersonate and then genuinely represent the needs and attitudes of the new literary class that was making its way in the English Departments of American colleges and universities, an increasingly important and estabished group of professor-poets concerned with what poetry should be admitted as part of its official culture." Far from accepting such a criticism, Leithauser's book only adds to the difficulty in understanding how that official culture subjected poetry to the misunderstanding Leithauser now blames the universities for. This book, then, is a wasted chance.
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