"Most critics," Randall Jarrell wrote in a 1952 essay, "are so domesticated as to seem institutions--as they stand there between reader and writer, so different from either, they remind one of the Wall standing between Pyramus and Thisbe." His complaint was as accurate then as it is now. Yet Jarrell himself had nothing of the literary obstructionist to him. The essays he wrote over the course of three decades--in which he mingled his assessments of poetry and prose with the occasional cri de coeur over the state of American civilization--always escort the reader directly into the inner sanctum of the work at hand. And they do so with such scintillating, comical brilliance that most other criticism seems to pale into testy insignificance. We should be grateful, then, that Brad Leithauser has assembled No Other Book, which returns to print many of Jarrell's imperishable picks and pans.

Jarrell's slash-and-burn style caused a certain discomfort among his fellow poets, particularly those who fell short of his sky-high standards. And indeed, his inspired jabs have lost little of their pungency or amusement: Oscar Williams's poetry, for example, "gave the impression of having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter." Even Walt Whitman, whose reputation Jarrell single-handedly repaired, gets the occasional spanking. Only a man with the most extraordinary feel for language, or none whatsoever, could have cooked up Whitman's worst messes. For instance: what other man in all the history of this planet would have said, "I am a habitant of Vienna"? (One has an immediate vision of him as a sort of French Canadian halfbreed to whom the Viennese are offering, with trepidation, through the bars of a zoological garden, little mounds of whipped cream.) A master of the sublime putdown, Jarrell was even more masterful when it came to praise: his essays on Whitman, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens permanently changed the way we read these poets. He also functioned as a early-warning system for his own generation and the one to follow--who else was sufficiently prescient to pick out Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich as front-runners? And unlike his New Critical contemporaries, Jarrell never made the mistake of divorcing life from art. His comment on Frost's poetry applies equally to his own productions: "How little they seem performances, no matter how brilliant or magical, how little things made primarily of words (or of ink and paper, either), and how much things made out of lives and the world that lives inhabit." No other poet has ever written about his art with such electricity and intelligence--which makes No Other Book one of the true treasures of this or any other year. --James Marcus


From Publishers Weekly
Few have written as compellingly or as memorably about the topics and writers they loved best as American poet, critic and essayist Jarrell (1914-1965). This important collection of 24 essays (plus snippets from over a dozen others) restores much of Jarrell's best nonfiction to print. Jarrell's own poetry still occasions debate, but his essays about poets won admiration from the start. He gained his reputation in the 1940s as a killingly witty reviewer of current verse; some of his most famous barbs get included here. But his real work was detailed, enthusiastic praise. Jarrell taught his peers to appreciate first the young Robert Lowell and W.H. Auden, then Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Walt Whitman and Robert Frost. Moore "not only can, but must, make poetry out of everything and anything"; a love poem by Frost "expresses... the transfiguring, almost inexpressible reaching out of the self to what has become closer and more personal than the self." The later Jarrell divided his prose between appreciations of poets, digressions on idiosyncratic passions, and funny or sad indictments of 1950s-style popular culture. Leithauser quite rightly devotes the first three-quarters of his book to Jarrell's essays on poets, the last quarter to those on other topicsAon fiction by Kipling and Christina Stead, on grade school education, on sports-car races. As a convincing, above all personal, guide to modern poets, and as a captivating writer of criticism, Jarrell has no obvious 20th-century equal: his essays charm readers coming and going, even as they divert us from their own delights, back to the poems and other art works they describe. (June) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Brooke Allen
...this volume is representative of his best work.... Jarrell was not only a great critic of poetry, he was a great critic of criticism.



"One cannot overpraise this substantial volume. These essays stand among the finest writing about literature ever done in America."


From Kirkus Reviews
A selection from the ardently, offhandedly composed criticism of, in editor Leithauser's words, ``an informal, brazen, unfootnoted diamond-in-the-rough. At the height of Jarrell's critical output, Berryman called him ``the most powerful reviewer of poetry active in this country,'' an ironic compliment for a prolific poet whose essay collections are now mostly out of print or unavailable. From Poetry and the Age (1953), A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1962), The Third Book of Criticism (1969), and Kipling, Auden & Co. (1980), poet and novelist Leithauser (Friends of Freeland, 1997, etc.) has assembled a representative sample of Jarrell's work on Willliam Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Robert Graves, W.H. Auden, and others; his views on reading and criticism; and his cultural commentaries. In his excellent pieces on Frost, Whitman, and Housman, Jarrell immediately distinguishes himself from coeval New Critics with his unfiltered sense of a poem's mood and affect as revealed in its language, rather than in the epistemological ambiguities of its diction. In addition to the longer pieces, Leithauser has assembled ``A Jarrell Gallery'' culled from other sources. These brief excerpts, each a paragraph at the most, evidence his keen pleasure in good poetry and his feared invective against bad (e.g., ``If [Stephen Spender] were as soft and sincere and sentimental as most of his poems make him out to be, the rabbits would have eaten him for lettuce, long ago''). Jarrell's writings on 1950s mass culture in ``The Rest of It, however, often display a time-capsule mustiness in their complaints about Reader's Digest culture and all-American conformity. Still, Jarrell's clear-eyed view of his times has a glint of prescient clarity, as when he decries the academic professionalization of criticism and its ascendency over the works examined in ``The Age of Criticism.'' In these well-chosen essays' unsparing generosityand disparagementJarrell, unlike most critics, vividly conveys his enthusiasm for and occasional disappointment with contemporary poetry. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

As a critic, Jarrell was chiefly interested in poetry, but his wide and avid circle of readers extended well beyond poets and students of verse. He attracted fans who wanted to hear what he had to say about anything - which was precisely what he offered them: he wrote about music criticism and abstract painting, about the appeal of sports cars and the role of the intellectual in modern American life, about forgotten novels and contemporary trends in education. Jarrell was only fifty-one at the time of his death, in 1965, yet he created a body of work that secured his position as one of the century's leading American men of letters. He saw himself chiefly as a poet, but in addition to a number of books of poetry he left behind a comic novel (Pictures from an Institution), four children's books, numerous translations, haunting letters. And he left four collections of essays, from each of which the present volume draws.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Few have written as compellingly or as memorably about the topics and writers they loved best as American poet, critic and essayist Jarrell (1914-1965). This important collection of 24 essays (plus snippets from over a dozen others) restores much of Jarrell's best nonfiction to print. Jarrell's own poetry still occasions debate, but his essays about poets won admiration from the start. He gained his reputation in the 1940s as a killingly witty reviewer of current verse; some of his most famous barbs get included here. But his real work was detailed, enthusiastic praise. Jarrell taught his peers to appreciate first the young Robert Lowell and W.H. Auden, then Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Walt Whitman and Robert Frost. Moore "not only can, but must, make poetry out of everything and anything"; a love poem by Frost "expresses... the transfiguring, almost inexpressible reaching out of the self to what has become closer and more personal than the self." The later Jarrell divided his prose between appreciations of poets, digressions on idiosyncratic passions, and funny or sad indictments of 1950s-style popular culture. Leithauser quite rightly devotes the first three-quarters of his book to Jarrell's essays on poets, the last quarter to those on other topics--on fiction by Kipling and Christina Stead, on grade school education, on sports-car races. As a convincing, above all personal, guide to modern poets, and as a captivating writer of criticism, Jarrell has no obvious 20th-century equal: his essays charm readers coming and going, even as they divert us from their own delights, back to the poems and other art works they describe. (June) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Christopher Caldwell - The Weekly Standard

No Other Book, a generous new selection of essays edited by the poet Brad Leithauser, shows the full range of [Jarrell's] critical talents.

Brooke Allen - The New York Times Book Review

Leithauser has limited himself...to 25 longer pieces that might be termed major....The exceptional critic, [Jarrell] memorably wrote, ''has not set up rigid standards to which a true work of art must conform, but...has tried instead to let the many true works of art — his experience of them — set up the general expectations to which his criticism of art conforms."

Kirkus Reviews

A selection from the ardently, offhandedly composed criticism of, in editor Leithauser's words, "an informal, brazen, unfootnoted diamond-in-the-rough." At the height of Jarrell's critical output, Berryman called him "the most powerful reviewer of poetry active in this country," an ironic compliment for a prolific poet whose essay collections are now mostly out of print or unavailable. From Poetry and the Age (1953), A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1962), The Third Book of Criticism (1969), and Kipling, Auden & Co. (1980), poet and novelist Leithauser (Friends of Freeland, 1997, etc.) has assembled a representative sample of Jarrell's work on Willliam Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Robert Graves, W.H. Auden, and others; his views on reading and criticism; and his cultural commentaries. In his excellent pieces on Frost, Whitman, and Housman, Jarrell immediately distinguishes himself from coeval New Critics with his unfiltered sense of a poem's mood and affect as revealed in its language, rather than in the epistemological ambiguities of its diction. In addition to the longer pieces, Leithauser has assembled "A Jarrell Gallery" culled from other sources. These brief excerpts, each a paragraph at the most, evidence his keen pleasure in good poetry and his feared invective against bad (e.g., "If [Stephen Spender] were as soft and sincere and sentimental as most of his poems make him out to be, the rabbits would have eaten him for lettuce, long ago"). Jarrell's writings on 1950s mass culture in "The Rest of It," however, often display a time-capsule mustiness in their complaints about Reader's Digest culture and all-American conformity. Still, Jarrell's clear-eyed view ofhis times has a glint of prescient clarity, as when he decries the academic professionalization of criticism and its ascendency over the works examined in "The Age of Criticism." In these well-chosen essays' unsparing generosity—and disparagement—Jarrell, unlike most critics, vividly conveys his enthusiasm for and occasional disappointment with contemporary poetry.