Randall Jarrell's Answerable Style: Revision of Elegy in "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner"

Cyr discusses the position of Randall Jarrell's The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner in the elegiac tradition. Among other things, Jarrell is engaged in a project of revising, indeed rejecting the style and ethic of a traditional genre, elegy, to make his poetry more adequately address and render the conditions of twentieth-century life in general, and twentieth-century war in particular. In writing what amounts to an anti-elegy, however, he manages to avoid mocking his elegiac subject, and with his avoidance writes mocked elegiac.