His Poetry and the Age begs for a criticism that "sounds as if it had been written by a reader for readers, by a human being for human beings," instead of by "a syndicate of encyclopedias for an audience of International Business Machines." He could dismiss the pedantries of his associates with a single slash. He ends an essay on Whitman: "I have said so little about Whitman's faults because they are so plain: baby critics who have barely learned to complain of the lack of ambiguity in Peter Rabbit can tell you what is wrong with Leaves of Grass."

"Like It!"

Those who admire Jarrell admire his taste, and it is fortunate that he was always right in his criticism, for he wrote with an authoritarian voice that could have sounded smart-aleck were he ever a shade off target. At times he seems to reach out from the page, shake the reader by the collar, and command "Like It!" with dictums like "these lines are so good that even admiration feels like insolence, and one is ashamed of anything one can find to say about them."

Because as Lowell says, "his dogmatism is completely unspoiled by the hedging equanimity that weakens the style and temperment of most serious writers," he became the most powerful American critic since Eliot. It is unlikely that anything better on Frost will ever be written than his "To the Laodiceans"--an exuberant reading of 35 of the best, but once unrecognized poems--most of them from Frost's dark side which he virtually discovered. And his review of Lowell's Lord Weary Castle reads, as one of the contributors says, like Coleridge on Wordsworth.

The subject of his successful criticism weren't always so happy. While he could communicate his enthusiasms with joyful immediacy, he could and did destroy bad books with a few merciless phrases. "He was immensely cruel," John Berryman writes, "and the extraordinary thing about it is that he didn't know he was cruel." Jarrell had some pity for bad poets ("it is as if writers had sent you their ripped out arms and legs with 'This is a poem' scrawled on them in lipstick.") but he could write nothing kind about their poems. And even a few of his memorialists (Allen Tate, for instance) clearly bear scars from the lash of his terrible swift tongue.

Jarrell, too, wrote poems. They read like his essays--pure, uncompromising, and dazzlingly intelligent. But Jarrell wasn't merely being modest when he said his readers must be indulgent of him--what he says is largely said elsewhere and without the grace of his voice, his poems might seem banal.

His best poems are about women, lonely middle-aged women facing their own decay. "The Face" describes without a touch of comforting illusion, a long hard stare into the mirror...

Not good any more, not beautiful -- Not even young. This isn't mine. Where is the old one, the old ones? Those were mine. It's so: I have pictures,

Not such old ones; people behaved Differently then...When they meet me they say: You haven't changed. I want to say: You haven't looked.

This is what happens to everyone. At first yo uget bigger, you know more,Then something goes wrong. You are, and you say: I am -- And you were...I've been too long.

I know there's no saying no, But just the same you say it. No, I'll point to myself and say: I'm not like this. --And even that's not so.

I thought: If nothing happens...and nothing happened. Here I am.

But it's not right.

If just living can do this, Living is more dangerous than anything.

It is terrible to be alive.