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The Ethical Uselessness of Grief: Randall Jarrell's “The Refugees”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

R. Clifton Spargo
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Abstract

From among the varied American responses to the events we now call the Holocaust, the most notorious of which may well be the United States’ illiberal policy on refugees from 1938 to 1944, there emerged a canon of internationalist-minded literature that included Randall Jarrell's “The Refugees.” In his refugee poem, Jarrell experimented with the form of public elegy, interrogating poetic conventions of mourning in order to consider the ethical and political consequences of our statements of grief. With its extremely economic form, “The Refugees” offers a study of the lyric's investment in an economy of identity all too readily coinciding with nationalistic modes of belonging. As the poem positions itself as an interventionist yet fatalistic response to contemporary refugees, I argue, it helps us articulate a definition of ethics, which necessarily involves the negotiation of cultural boundaries and remains always a matter of eminently political concern.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 120 , Issue 1: Special Topic: On Poetry , January 2005 , pp. 49 - 65
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2005

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