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     During the 1940s, Randall Jarrell worked on, but never completed or published, a collection of aphorisms, collecting, revising, crossing out, re-ordering and adding to sets of one-sentence or one-paragraph sayings in a succession of notebook and typescript pages. The most complete drafts give the collection a title, ‘Sayings of the Bloksberg Post’ – a reference to the mountain where witches gather at the end of Goethe’s Faust, Part I.

     Jarrell worked on ‘Sayings’ as he was inventing an appropriate style for his poems: one of its pages also contains drafts stanzas for his seminal 1942 poem ‘90 North’. At the same time, he was preparing an essay on other people’s aphorisms: the folder amongst the Jarrell papers at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, and notebooks from the same period and later, contain notes for an essay about, or a collection of, others’ sayings;

Mostly Goethe, some Johnson, Blake, Heraclitus; a few of von Hoffmansthal’s; a few at random from different writers. All discussed.  Quote a few from Freud, some from Rilke, a few from Thoreau and Emerson.

The same essay was to include analyses of passages of prose,

often two from a writer: Wolfe, Conrad, Faulkner, Blake, Crime and Punishment, Huckleberry Finn, Hemingway, Blackmur, pedantic passage, new criticism passage, Bemelmans, Chuang Tzu, Out of Africa, Kafka (and Tolstoy and Nijinsky with Pure Narrative), Hardy, part of [Peter Taylor’s short story] ‘What You Hear from Em?’, Eur[ipides?], and [Samuel] Johnson.

     A notebook Jarrell used in the 1940s, a binder’s dummy of Audobon’s Birds of America, contains notes for an essay to be entitled ‘Joke Simile Saying’; the notes begin “Same thing in end, jumps between apparently impossible – to connect ranges makes us feel world understandable, ours in end.” Jarrell took up the topic of the aphorism in essays he did complete, notably in a lecture at Princeton published posthumously in the Georgia Review as ‘Levels and Opposites’, which explained,

The generalizations most akin to poetry are not logical generalizations, but are those which tend to be paradoxical, contradictory, ambiguous, in form as well as content; I am talking about those proverbs or apothegms which reach their height in the sayings of Blake or Christ or Heraclitus: Time is the mercy of Eternity; To men some things are good and some bad, but to God all things are fitting and right and proper; If a seed die... and so on. If these are not short poems, what are they?

Jarrell’s own aphorisms reflect an unrepentant pessimism, a resignation unable to hold back anger; it is tempting to connect their mood to the world war, though it’s not clear when Jarrell began the project, or when he gave it up. A few of the aphorisms turned up in Jarrell’s published writings (“How well we all die!” became the last line of Jarrell’s poem ‘The Boyg, Peer Gynt, The One Only One’; the joke about Patagonia, and the saying about people in Hell, and two others, reappeared slightly altered in his 1952 novel Pictures from an Institution).

     The work printed here compiles all the sayings in what seem to be the latest drafts of the aphorisms project, along with aphorisms culled from earlier drafts, which Jarrell discarded or failed to copy into the incomplete late drafts. All the material here is in the Berg Collection; most is in a folder marked ‘Aphorisms’, though two come from another folder mostly given to drafts of poems, and others still from the versions of ‘Sayings’ in the binder’s dummy of Birds of America. Since Jarrell never brought the project to completion or settled on a final ordering, the order of the aphorisms presented here (though influenced by his drafts) is finally my own.