“[Robert Lowell] is a poet of both Will and Imagination, but his Will is always seizing his Imagination by the shoulders and saying to it in a grating voice: “Don’t sit there fooling around; get to work!” — and his poor Imagination gets tense all over and begins to revolve determinedly and familiarly, like a squirrel in a squirrel-cage. Goethe talked about the half-somnambulistic state of the poet; but Mr. Lowell too often is either having a nightmare or else is wide awake gritting his teeth and working away at All The Things He Does Best. Cocteau said to poets: Learn what you can do and then don’t do it; and this is so—we do it enough without trying. As a poet Mr. Lowell sometimes doesn’t have enough trust in God and tries to do everything himself: he proposes and disposes — and this helps to give a certain monotony to his work.”

— Randall Jarrell

“Three Books”, p. 236
Poetry and the Age (1953)

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Randall Jarrell 215

poet, critic, novelist, essayist 1914–1965

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