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Authors
Randall Jarrell (1914-1965)
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Jarrell’s Complete Poems was published in 1969, and a Selected Poems appeared in 1991. A selection of Jarrell’s brilliant critical essays is available in No Other Book (1999), edited by Brad Leithauser. His novel satirizing American academic life, Pictures from an Institution, appeared in 1954. Some of the most valuable commentary on Jarrell’s life and work is to be found in a memorial volume of essays edited by Robert Lowell, Peter Taylor, and Robert Penn Warren, Randall Jarrell, 1914–1965 (1967). William Pritchard’s fine Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life (1990) illumines Jarrell’s life and work, as does Mary Randall’s Remembering Randall (1999). Critical discussion of Jarrell’s work appears in Thomas Travisano’s Midcentury Quartet (1999).
Born in Nashville, Tennessee, and raised in Long Beach, California, Randall Jarrell studied psychology as an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University and stayed to pursue a graduate degree in literature. Jarrell remained in academia throughout his life, teaching at Kenyon College, at the University of Texas, at Sarah Lawrence College, and, until his death, at the University of North Carolina at Greenboro. He worked as poetry editor for The Nation and, in his collection of essays and reviews, Poetry and the Age (1953), introduced the public to poets such as Elizabeth Bishop and William Carlos Williams. Jarrell believed that poetry was a democratic genre, and he attempted to compose poems that would speak to a wide audience. His poetry is marked by its plain voice and by the speaker's ability to identify with the heartbreak, loneliness, and dreams of everyday life. Jarrell's collections include Little Friend, Little Friend (1945), Losses (1960), The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960), and The Lost World (1965).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Jarrell's poems can seem like austere exercises in romantic desperation or even in nihilism. In the closing lines of 90 North (1942), The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner (1945), and Thinking of the Lost World (1965), the darkness seems so absolute as to allow no room for escape, no room for poetry. However, the haunting eloquence of Jarrell's lines has thematic importance as well, and that eloquence requires our attention before we decide that he is a poet of abject despair.
1. The meter of 90 North varies, but many of the lines show classic lengths and cadences. Describe them. What kinds of poems or soliloquies do they recall? Do you hear echoes of other literary voices in this poem? If we think of this poem as a dramatic monologue, rather than as a final statement on the "meaningless" core of life, how is our reading of the poem affected?
2. Compare The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner to Pound's In a Station at the Metro. Is Pound's poem echoed in Jarrell's? If so, why? Is Thoreau echoed or alluded to here as well? If so, what is the effect of that allusion?
3. In Second Air Force (1945) and Next Day (1965), Jarrell writes from the perspective of a woman. Write about the imaginative risks that Jarrell takes in doing so, and comment on whether or not he achieves, in these poems, a believable sensibility.
