Category: Modern Poetry and Poetics

Which of the following statements best characterizes Randall Jarrell’s 1945 poem “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” ?

A. The poem contrasts the image of a child in its mother’s womb with cruel devaluation of human life in wartime.
B. The poem praises those technological achievements which protect human life in wartime.
C. The poem uses images of the apocalypse to criticize the cruelty of war.
D. The poem presents the war as a natural part of the perennial cycles of human history.