From Publishers Weekly
Randall Jarrell wrote one of the major mid-20th-century works of poetry criticism (Poetry and the Age, 1953); Burt wrote the major 21st-century study (so far) of Randall Jarrell (Randall Jarrell and His Age, 2002). In his introduction to this set of six lectures, which Jarrell delivered at Princeton in 1952, Burt establishes the key, if contentious, role W.H. Auden's work played in Jarrell's own development as a poet and critic. As New Yorker writer Adam Gopnick points out in his foreword, Jarrell's lectures present an "almost comically detailed analysis of the transformation of Auden's rhetoric in the 1940s," a crux period in Auden's career-he had emigrated to the United States from England a few years earlier, and in that time he had come to abjure the "We must love one another or die" sentiments of "September 1st, 1939," which he composed almost immediately after his arrival. Gopnick finds the essays to be "a cutting contest without cuts, an occasion of witticisms more than a battle of wits." Indeed, Jarrell does seem to be trying to best the older (and more famous) poet at the same time that he is lavishing attention on his smallest rhetorical shifts-and working hard to impress the audience as he sings for his supper (Burt details the financial arrangements). Jarrell registers multiple complaints about Auden's seeming "liberal pieties" (as Gopnick calls them, though he does not think them such) and the taming effect they have had on his verse. Despite the ambivalence evident throughout the lectures, it is clear that Jarrell thought Auden worth reading to the dregs. The number of people today who have read Auden's poetry of the 1940s is smaller than the work merits, and the same goes for Jarrell's poetry and criticism throughout his career. This set of critical engagements, published here for the first time, allows one to start right in the middle of two mid-century titans. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"W. H. Auden's debut as a poet, in 1928, was the most prodigious since Byron's. When he arrived on the American scene in 1939, he continued to dazzle readers in this country--none more so than Randall Jarrell, who had been reading and admiring him from the start. Auden's triumphal march across the next decade, though, began to disconcert Jarrell, and these Princeton lectures are the record of his mixed feelings. His readings are bracing, and his conclusions misjudged, but where else will one encounter a major poet so intimately engaged with the work of another? We're told that, informed of Jarrell's attacks. Auden merely shrugged, "I think Jarrell must be in love with me," and in a crucial sense he was right." -- J. D. McClatchy, Yale Review

Review
"Jarrell's brilliant long essays on Auden's stylistic and philosophical development have become classics of mid-century criticism. These six lectures extend the essays in their evaluative force, lightning insight and generalizing power. He invites us not only to measure but to understand, as in Lecture Six when he walks us through the difficult terrain of Paid on Both Sides. Jarrell's Auden is a poet (like Jarrell himself) working out a moral vision for his time, and developing a language for that vision. Jarrell portrays Auden with the utmost respect, as a truly human poet whose errancy becomes part of his nobility. One senses the resistance, at times, of a poet-critic wary of another poet's strong influence. Yet in holding Auden to his own highest standard, indeed to the highest standard of English poetry, Jarrell is always illuminating. Stephen Burt's introduction provides the full story of these lectures, and of Jarrell's life-long preoccupation with Auden's work; the detailed, reliable notes answer every question and comprise a concise chapter of literary history." -- Bonnie Costello, author of Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry

Book Description
Jarrell's witty, pointed, and long-lost lectures trace the evolution of Auden's style from the late 1920s to the early 1950s and examine the ideas and contexts that animated his poetry, including psychoanalysis, leftist politics, and Christian theology. Delivered at Princeton University in 1952, these six lectures offer new insights into Auden's poetry, particularly his long poems, and Jarrell's own work as critic and poet.

About the Author
Stephen Burt is assistant professor of English at Macalester College. He is the author of Randall Jarrell and His Age and Popular Music, a collection of poems. His reviews and essays on poetry have appeared in several journals, including the Boston Review, London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
To read Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden is to read the best-equipped of American critics of poetry of the past century on the best-equipped of its Anglo-American poets, and we rush to read, perhaps, less out of an academic interest in fair judgment than out of a spectator's love of virtuosity in flight. (From the foreword by Adam Gopnik)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The poet who most fascinated and infuriated Randall Jarrell was W. H. Auden. While an affectionate and admiring reader of Auden, Jarrell does not avoid identifying his poetic failures and political excesses. Jarrell's witty, pointed, and controversial lectures trace the evolution of Auden's style from the late 1920s to the early 1950s and examine the ideas and contexts that animated his poetry, including psychoanalysis, leftist politics, and Christian theology.