Randall Jarrell

Randall Jarrell (6 May 1914 – 14 October 1965) was an American poet, literary critic, novelist, translator, and children’s book author who occupied a central place in mid-century American literary life — as a poet of the Second World War, as the most brilliant and feared poetry critic of his generation, and as a man whose generosity to other writers was as legendary as his devastating reviews of bad ones.

War Poetry

Jarrell served in the Army Air Forces during the Second World War (as a navigation instructor, not in combat) and produced the finest body of war poetry written by any American in the conflict. His war poems — collected in Little Friend, Little Friend (1945) and Losses (1948) — are compassionate, technically accomplished, and psychologically devastating.

“The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” is probably the most famous American poem of the Second World War:

“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.”

The poem’s five lines achieve a compression and a horror that longer works cannot match. Jarrell’s war poems are not heroic or patriotic; they are poems about boys — he insists on their youth and their bewilderment — caught in a machinery of death that they do not understand.

The Critic

Jarrell’s literary criticism — collected in Poetry and the Age (1953), A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1962), and The Third Book of Criticism (1969, posthumous) — is among the finest written in English in the twentieth century. He could praise and he could demolish with equal brilliance: his essays on Frost, Whitman, Stevens, and Williams are models of sympathetic critical intelligence, while his negative reviews — he once described a poet’s collected works as “the complete remains” — were so witty and so final that poets lived in terror of them.

Robert Lowell called Jarrell “the most heartbreaking English poet of his generation” and “the most intelligent literary critic of his age.” Both judgments were accurate.

Pictures from an Institution (1954)

Jarrell’s only novel is a satirical comedy set at Benton College (a thinly disguised version of Sarah Lawrence, where Jarrell taught). The novel is plotless — a sequence of brilliantly observed vignettes and devastating character sketches — and its wit is so concentrated and so continuous that it is exhausting and exhilarating in equal measure. It is one of the finest American academic novels.

Later Poetry

Jarrell’s later poems — collected in The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960, National Book Award) and The Lost World (1965) — move away from war toward domestic life, childhood memory, and the experience of ageing. These poems are softer and more personal than the war poetry but equally accomplished. “Next Day,” about a middle-aged woman’s visit to the supermarket, is one of the great American poems of its period.

Children’s Books

Jarrell wrote four beloved children’s books: The Bat-Poet (1964), about a bat who becomes a poet; The Animal Family (1965), about a hunter who adopts a mermaid, a bear, and a lynx; Fly by Night (1976, posthumous); and The Gingerbread Rabbit (1964). The Bat-Poet is an allegorical defence of poetry itself — the bat’s poems, which describe the world from the bat’s unique perspective, are met with incomprehension and indifference by his fellow bats.

Death

Jarrell was struck by a car in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in October 1965. Whether his death was an accident or suicide has been debated ever since. He had suffered from depression and had been hospitalised earlier that year.

Legacy

Jarrell is one of the essential American poets of the twentieth century — alongside Lowell, Berryman, Bishop, and Roethke. His war poetry is permanent. His criticism set a standard that has not been equalled. His novel is a minor masterpiece.

Collecting Jarrell

Blood for a Stranger (1942, Harcourt Brace) — his first collection — in first edition is the primary Jarrell collectible. Little Friend, Little Friend (1945) and Losses (1948) in first editions are also sought. Jarrell’s books were published in modest printings and signed copies are rare.