Poetry and Guilt

PERSON, PLACE AND THING--Karl Jay Shapiro--Reynal & Hitchcock ($2).

BLOOD FOR A STRANGER--Randall Jarrell--Harcourt, Brace ($2).

Modernist poetry constitutes, in its entirety, a piecemeal bible of human guilt. In some of the bible's sections--T. S. Eliot's poems, for instance--human guilt appears as a world poison emanating from mankind's sins against God. Other modernist poets leave God, for all practical purposes, out of the picture. Human guilt, in their books, is simply the poisonous sum of people's transgressions against other people and against themselves. But whether the modernist poets speak as religionists or as non-religionists, they all seem to be trying to say that the world is a guilty world. Not a naughty world, or a bad world, but a guilty one.

Two young U.S. poets who add new chapters to the modernist testimony are Karl Jay Shapiro, 29, and Randall Jarrell, 28. Shapiro, drafted into the army in 1941, is on duty as a sergeant somewhere in the southwest Pacific. Baltimore-born, poverty-wise, he is a Jew who has lived outside the pale in a democracy that often proudly kids itself that it erects no pales. At the University of Virginia, which he attended only long enough to leave in disgust, he decided that

To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew [was] the curriculum.

Lack of funds brought to an end two years spent at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins on a scholarship.

Shapiro's comments on the American scene are remarkably fresh and versatile, touch on such matters of general interest as haircuts, Buick cars, street accidents, the Washington Cathedral, army camps, the housefly, Hollywood. Shapiro describes American democracy with the satirical gusto of an outcast who feels he is in the know about what it is really like.

His self-satisfaction about being in the know, while giving his poetry confidence and verve, unfortunately cancels it out as a remedial criticism of American life. In some of his later poems Shapiro seems to be trying, by writing in an unreticent personal vein, to escape from his sophistication. The results are at best ingenuous, at worst maudlin.

Compared with Shapiro, Randall Jarrell, formerly a tennis-playing English teacher at the University of Texas, now in the Army Air Forces, writes like a spoiled darling. But, though Jarrell has suffered neither social nor economic disabilities, he makes a moving protest against the world of his time. Some of the lyrics in Blood for a Stranger register the pain of human guilt as it has seldom been registered in American poetry. He writes:

"I was born in a hut, my wit is heavy.

My sister died, they killed my father.

There is no time I was not hungry. They used me, I am dying, I stand here among graves."

The white, the yellow, the black man said.

And the world said, Child, you will not be missed.

You are cheaper than a wrench, your back is a road;

Your death is a table in a book.

You had our wit, our heart was sealed to you. . . .

"Man," says Jarrell, trying to sum up the whole matter of human guilt and punishment, "is the judgment of the world." With shocked seriousness, Jarrell tries to exorcize the judgment that his fellow criminals have brought on themselves by singing of Man's inability to be other than he is. He does his best to broadcast a hope that if men acknowledged their helplessness in the world as children acknowledge theirs, innocence might appear, like a terrestrial angel, among them.

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