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Randall Jarrell
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| Biography: Randall Jarrell |
Randall Jarrell (1914-1965), poet and critic, was one of the most versatile American men of letters during the two decades immediately after World War II.
Randall Jarrell was born June 6, 1914, in Nashville, Tennessee, but spent most of his early years on the West Coast, in Long Beach and Hollywood, California. His troubled, lonely childhood is reflected in some of his most vivid poems. When he was 11 his parents separated, and he lived for a time with his father's parents before joining his mother back in Nashville. He took business courses in high school, but as a student at Vanderbilt he came under the influence of John Crowe Ransom, with Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren one of the leaders of an earlier Southern poetry renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s.
Jarrell's early poetry was largely shaped by a continuing relationship with Ransom. He took bachelor's and master's degrees at Vanderbilt, and in 1937 followed Ransom to Kenyon College where they both taught English. Jarrell's early poems appeared in the American Review and Southern Review, and also in the Kenyon Review, founded by Ransom. During the years before World War II Jarrell had rich association with a number of young writers who also gained recognition later, such as the poet Robert Lowell and the fiction writer Peter Taylor.
Jarrell served in the U.S. Air Force during much of World War II. Ironically, he owed much of his reputation with the general public to his war poems: "Eighth Air Force," "Losses," and most especially "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," one of the most famous short poems to come out of this conflict:
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Actually, Jarrell had been washed out of flight training and spent most of the war on the ground in Illinois and Arizona.
In the two decades after World War II, Jarrell did most of his writing in an academic setting. After a short appointment at the University of Texas, he spent most of the last 18 years of his life as a professor of English at the Women's College of the University of North Carolina, in Greensboro. His greatest influence on American letters and in the lives of younger poets was exercised during this period. He was always encouraging and generous in his support of these writers. Two official positions enhanced this influence: poetry consultant of the Library of Congress and chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Jarrell was also the recipient of two Guggenheim fellowships. In this fruitful period he became respected as much for his criticism as for his poetry, serving at various times as poetry editor or critic for Nation, Partisan Review, and the Yale Review.
Jarrell also made one notable contribution to the newly important academic novel with Pictures from an Institution (1954). This is a satire of a "progressive" college and closely observed feuding among faculty and administration described with wit and epigrammatic characterization.
Writing about his own poetry, Jarrell was characteristically modest. "I have tried to make my poems plain, and most of them are plain enough; but I wish they were more difficult because I had known more." If they are plain they are often deeply meaningful, more resonant and complex than may at first appear. His most common themes, in addition to the "knowing yet innocent" child's view of the world and the horror of war, are the energies of art and the banalities of postwar American consumerism. The materialist way of life is scathingly anatomized in a series of satirical poems, one of the best of which is "The Woman at the Washington Zoo" (1960).
Jarrell's idiomatic poetry was written to be listened to, joining the popular style of the 1960s and younger poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. But Jarrell's work is much more disciplined, his persona more varied, than that of the Beat School. He was a gifted prosodist, equally at ease with free and traditional verse forms, and he wrote vivid modern versions of such established forms as the sestina. Also, he could effectively combine different poetic modes. A fine fusion of person portrait with social satire is to be found in "In Montecito" (1963).
In the historical context of Anglo-American poetry Jarrell's work echoes back to the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning, through the war poetry of Wilfred Owen, presaging, ultimately, the last confessional poems of his friend Robert Lowell. Although Jarrell is not a Sylvia Plathlike confessional poet, late in his life he became more directly personal in "The Lost World" and "Thinking about the Lost World" (1965).
There are still other facets of Jarrell's expression. He translated works by Rilke, E. Morike, and Tristan Corbiere and was working on a translation of Goethe's Faust at the time of his death. He also wrote highly successful children's books, among which are The Bat Poet (1964) and The Animal Family (1965). In his quiet way he was a Renaissance person, a versatile "man of letters in the European sense, with real verve, imagination and uniqueness" (Robert Lowell). This still evolving career was cut short when Jarrell was struck and killed by an auto in Greensboro, North Carolina, on October 14, 1965.
Further Reading
Jarrell's works include, among others, The Complete Poems (1969). His books of criticism include: Poetry and the Age (1953); A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1962); and The Third Book of Criticism (1971). Randall Jarrell: 1914-1965 (1967) is a book of personal reminiscences edited by Robert Lowell, Peter Taylor, and Robert Penn Warren. Suzanne Ferguson's The Poetry of Randall Jarrell (1971) is a comprehensive critical assessment. Twenty years after his death his widow, Mary Jarrell, edited Randall Jarrell's Letters: An Autobiographical and Literary Selection (1985).
Additional Sources
Jarrell, Randall, Randall Jarrell's letters: an autobiographical and literary selection, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985.
Meyers, Jeffrey, Manic power: Robert Lowell and his circle, London; New York: Macmillan London, 1987.
Pritchard, William H., Randall Jarrell: a literary life, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990.
| Fairy Tale Companion: Randall Jarrell |
Jarrell, Randall (1914–65), American poet, novelist, critic, and writer for children. Reviewing Jarrell's Selected Poems (1955), Karl Shapiro remarked that the book's subtitle should be ‘Hansel and Gretel in America’. Jarrell's fairy‐tale poetry blends advocacy for children with an intense interest in psychoanalysis. The title of his 1951 collection The Seven‐League Crutches evokes the difficulty of ‘learning from tales' (‘The Märchen’, 1948) in a post‐war world where wishing no longer does much good. Jarrell's poems update tales such as Andersen's ‘The Little Mermaid’, ‘La Belle au Bois Dormant’ (‘Sleeping Beauty’), and ‘Cinderella’, and the Grimms' tale ‘The Juniper Tree’ plays a crucial role in his only novel, Pictures from an Institution (1954). In the early 1960s Jarrell began translating the Grimms' tales collected in The Golden Bird and Other Fairy Tales (1962) and those of Ludwig Bechstein in The Rabbit Catcher (1962). Before his untimely death, he went on to write his own children's fairy tales, The Gingerbread Rabbit (1964) illustrated by Garth Williams, The Bat‐Poet (1964), Fly By Night (1976), and The Animal Family (1965), all illustrated by Maurice Sendak. The last is a haunting and disturbing variation on motifs from Hans Christian Andersen and the Grimms in which a hunter and a mermaid invent a family.
Bibliography
- Ferguson, Suzanne, The Poetry of Randall Jarrell (1971).
- Flynn, Richard, Randall Jarrell and the Lost World of Childhood (1990).
- Griswold, Jerome, The Children's Books of Randall Jarrell (1988).
- Pritchard, William, Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life (1990).
— Richard Flynn
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Randall Jarrell |
Jarrell, Randall (jərĕl'), 1914-65, American poet and critic, b. Nashville, Tenn., grad. Vanderbilt Univ. (B.A., 1935; M.A., 1938). His poetry, reflecting an unusually sensitive and tragic view of life, includes Blood for a Stranger (1942), The Seven-League Crutches (1951), and The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960). His best-known poem, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," was a mediation on his experiences during World War II. In 1953 his critical essays were collected and published as Poetry and the Age. Jarrell's other works include several delightful children's books; Pictures from an Institution (1954), a satirical novel set in a progressive women's college; and A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1962), a collection of essays and fables.
Bibliography
See his complete poems (1969); posthumous collections of his criticism and essays, The Third Book of Criticism (1969), Kipling, Auden & Co. (1980), and No Other Book (ed. by B. Leithauser, 1999); his letters (ed. by M. Jarrell, 1985); memoir by his wife, Mary Jarrell (1999); studies by R. Lowell et al., ed. (1967), C. Beck (1983), J. Bryant (1986), and S. Burt (2003); bibliography by S. Wright (1986).
| Works: Works by Randall Jarrell |
(1914-1965)
| 1942 | Blood for a Stranger. Jarrell's first published volume is an impressive debut of witty, sardonic, and technically accomplished verse, establishing him as a significant new poetic voice. Born in Nashville, Jarrell was influenced by John Crowe Ransom while a student at Vanderbilt. He served in the Air Force during the war. |
| 1945 | Little Friend, Little Friend. Critics detect a new depth and directness in contrast to the poet's earlier witty, acerbic style and attribute the change to the poet's participation in the war, serving in the U.S. Army Air Corps. The volume includes Jarrell's most anthologized poem, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." |
| 1948 | Losses. The poet's third collection is an impassioned response to the war in poems such as "Burning the Letters," "The Dead Wingman," and "Eighth Air Force." |
| 1951 | The Seven-League Crutches. Jarrell's collection, which includes his first translations, is enthusiastically praised by Robert Lowell, who declares Jarrell to be "our most talented poet under 40." |
| 1953 | Poetry and the Age. Jarrell's first book of criticism includes general essays on the state of modern poetry and criticism, as well as important evaluations of poets such as Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Lowell. |
| 1954 | Pictures from an Institution. Jarrell's satirical novel anatomizes incivility, complacency, and provincialism in a progressive women's college. Robert Lowell calls it "a unique and serious jokebook," and others regard it as a clever portrait of the intellectual life of the period. |
| 1955 | Selected Poems. Jarrell compiles selections from his previous volumes, many revised, in addition to two new works, along with an introduction that explains the background and intent of some of his poems. |
| 1960 | The Woman at the Washington Zoo. Published to critical acclaim and winning a National Book Award, the collection contains some of Jarrell's finest verse, including the title work, a confessional poem disguised as a monologue delivered by a fictitious speaker. This technique becomes one of Jarrell's hallmarks. |
| 1965 | The Lost World. Jarrell's final collection of new works includes an appreciatory introduction by Robert Lowell. The poems continue the style and autobiographical method of The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960). |
| Quotes By: Randall Jarrell |
Quotes:
"One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child."
| Wikipedia: Randall Jarrell |
| Randall Jarrell | |
|---|---|
 Jarrell in 1956. |
|
| Born | May 6, 1914 Nashville, Tennessee |
| Died | October 14, 1965 (aged 51) Chapel Hill, North Carolina |
| Occupation | poet, critic, novelist, and essayist |
| Nationality | American |
| Notable award(s) | National Book Award |
Randall Jarrell (6 May 1914 – 14 October 1965) was an American poet, critic,children's author, essayist, and novelist. He was the 11th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.
Contents |
Biography
Jarrell was a native of Nashville, Tennessee and graduated from Vanderbilt University. At Vanderbilt, he was acquainted with poets of the Fugitives group. Jarrell followed critic John Crowe Ransom from Vanderbilt to Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where Jarrell wrote a masters thesis on the poetry of Alfred Edward Housman, and roomed with poet Robert Lowell. Lowell and Jarrell remained good friends and peers until Jarrell's death. According to Lowell biographer Paul Mariani, "Jarrell was the first person of [Lowell's] own generation [whom he] genuinely held in awe" due to Jarrell's brilliance and confidence even at the age of 23.[1]
Jarrell finished his Master's degree from Vanderbilt in 1938, then went on to teach at the University of Texas at Austin from 1939 to 1942, where he met his first wife, Mackie Langham. In 1942 he left the university to join the United States Army Air Forces, and according his obituary, he "[started] as a flying cadet, [then] he later became a celestial navigation tower operator, a job title he considered the most poetic in the Air Force."[2] His early poetry would focus on the subject of his war-time experiences in the Air Force.
The Jarrell obit goes on to state that "after being discharged from the service he joined the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., for a year before going to the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina where, as an associate professor of English, he taught modern poetry and imaginative writing." [2]
Some of the awards that he received during his lifetime included a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1947-48, a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1951, and the National Book Award in 1960.
On October 14, 1965, while walking along a road in Chapel Hill near dusk, Jarrell was struck by a car and killed. The coroner ruled the death accidental, but Jarrell had recently been treated for mental illness and a previous suicide attempt, so some of the people closest to Jarrell suspected that he might have committed suicide. In a letter to Elizabeth Bishop about a week after Jarrell's death, Robert Lowell wrote, "There's a small chance [that Jarrell's death] was an accident. . . [but] I think it was suicide, and so does everyone else, who knew him well."[3] Still, Jarrell's second wife Mary (whom he'd married in 1952) held that his death was an accident.
On February 28, 1966, a memorial service was held in Jarrell's honor at Yale University, and some of the best-known poets in the country attended and spoke at the event, including Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, John Berryman, Stanley Kunitz, and Robert Penn Warren. Reporting on the memorial service, the New York Times quoted Lowell who said that Jarrell was, "'the most heartbreaking poet of our time'. . . [and] had written 'the best poetry in English about the Second World War.'"[4]
In 2004, the Metropolitan Nashville Historical Commission approved placement of a historical marker in his honor, to be placed at Hume-Fogg High School, which he attended.
Career
His first collection of poetry, Blood from a Stranger, which was heavily influenced by W.H. Auden, was published in 1942 – the same year he enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps. He spent a brief time working as a pilot, but soon switched to working as an aviation instructor. His second and third books, Little Friend, Little Friend (1945) and Losses (1948), drew heavily on his Army experiences. It was in these books that Jarrell broke free of Auden's influence and developed his own style and poetic philosophy which he would later document in his critical essays. "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" is the most famous of Jarrell's war-poems and one that is frequently anthologized. It presents the soldier as innocent and child-like, placing blame for war on "the State."
However, during this period, he earned a reputation primarily as a critic, rather than as a poet. Encouraged by Edmund Wilson, who published Jarrell's criticism in The New Republic, Jarrell quickly became a fiercely humorous critic of fellow poets. In the post-war period, his criticism began to change, showing a more positive emphasis. His appreciations of Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams helped to establish or resuscitate their reputations as significant American poets, and his poet/friends often returned the favor, as when Lowell wrote a review of Jarrell's book of poems, The Seven League Crutches in 1951. Lowell wrote that Jarrell was "the most talented poet under forty, and one whose wit, pathos, and grace remind us more of Pope or Matthew Arnold than of any of his contemporaries." In the same review, Lowell calls Jarrell's first book of poems, Blood for A Stranger "a tour-de-force in the manner of Auden."[5] And in another book review for Jarrell's Selected Poems, a few years later, fellow-poet Karl Shapiro compared Jarrell to "the great modern Rainer Maria Rilke" and stated that the book "should certainly influence our poetry for the better. It should become a point of reference, not only for younger poets, but for all readers of twentieth-century poetry." [6]
Jarrell is also noted for his essays on Robert Frost — whose poetry was a large influence on Jarrell's own — Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and others, which were mostly collected in Poetry and the Age (1953). Many scholars consider him the most astute poetry critic of his generation, and in 1979, the author and poet Peter Levi went so far as to advise younger writers, "Take more notice of Randall Jarrell than you do of any academic critic."[7]
His reputation as a poet was not firmly established until 1960, when his National Book Award-winning collection The Woman at the Washington Zoo was published. His final volume, The Lost World, published in 1966, cemented that reputation; many critics consider it his best work. The book's subject, one of Jarrell's favorites, is childhood. Jarrell also published a satiric novel, Pictures from an Institution, in 1954 (nominated for 1955 National Book Award) — drawing upon his teaching experiences at Sarah Lawrence College, which served as the model for the fictional Benton College — and several children's stories, among which The Bat-Poet (1964) and The Animal Family (1965) are considered prominent. He translated poems by Rainer Maria Rilke and others, a play by Anton Chekhov, and several Grimm fairy tales. He served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress — a position today known as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry — from 1956-1958.
Bibliography
- Blood for A Stranger. NY: Harcourt, 1942.
- Little Friend, Little Friend. NY: Dial, 1945.
- Losses. NY: Harcourt, 1948.
- The Seven League Crutches. NY: Harcourt, 1951.
- Poetry and the Age. NY: Knopf, 1953.
- Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy. New York: Knopf, 1954.
- Selected Poems. New York: Knopf, 1955.
- The Woman at the Washington Zoo: Poems and Translations. New York: Atheneum, 1960.
- A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables. NY: Atheneum, 1962.
- Selected Poems including The Woman at the Washington Zoo. NY: Macmillan, 1964.
- The Bat-Poet. Pictures by Maurice Sendak. NY: Macmillan, 1964.
- The Lost World. NY: Macmillan, 1965.
- The Animal Family. Illustrated by Maurice Sendak. NY: Pantheon Books, 1965.
- Randall Jarrell, 1914-1965. Edited by Robert Lowell, Peter Taylor, and Robert Penn Warren. NY: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1968.
- The Third Book of Criticism. NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969.
- The Complete Poems. NY: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1969.
- Fly by Night. Illustrated by Maurice Sendak. NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976.
- Kipling, Auden & Co.: Essays and Reviews, 1935-1964. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979.
- Randall Jarrell's Letters: An Autobiographical and Literary Selection. edited by Mary Jarrell and Stuart Wright. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985.
- Selected Poems. Edited by William Pritchard. NY: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1990.
- No Other Book: Selected Essays. Edited by Brad Leithauser. NY: HarperCollins, 1995.
- Randall Jarrell on W.H. Auden. Edited by Stephen Burt with Hannah Brooks-Motl. NY: Columbia University Press, 2005.
References
- ^ Mariani, Paul. Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell. New York: Norton, 1994.
- ^ a b "Randall Jarrell, Poet, Killed By Car in Carolina." The New York Times 15 October 1965.
- ^ Lowell, Robert. "To Elizabeth Bishop." 28 October 1965. Letter 464 in The Letters of Robert Lowell. Ed. Saskia Hamilton. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2005. 465.
- ^ Gilroy, Harry. "Poets Honor Memory of Jarrell at Yale." The New York Times 1 March 1966.
- ^ Lowell, Robert. "With Wild Dogmatism." New York Times Book Review 7 October 1951, p. 7.
- ^ Shapiro, Karl. "In the Forest of the Little People." The New York Times Book Review 13 March 1955.
- ^ The Paris Review, The Art of Poetry No. 14 Peter Levi, Interviewed by Jannika Hurwitt. Issue 76, Fall 1979.
External links
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Randall Jarrell |
- Randall Jarrell at Find a Grave
- Jarrell page at Poets.org
- Jarrell page at Modern American Poetry site
- Randall Jarrell's time at the Library of Congress, Beltway Poetry Quarterly
- Finding Aid for the Randall Jarrell Papers at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro
- Works by or about Randall Jarrell in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
- Jarrell on the New York Times Featured Authors site
- News of historical marker
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