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Randall Jarrell (1914-1965)

LINKS

http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=9

This link connects you to the Academy of American Poets. Here you will find an exhibit on Randall Jarrell including a biography, online primary texts, criticism, bibliographic information, and additional links.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/jarrell/jarrell.htm

This link connects you to the Modern American Poetry site, edited by Professor Cary Nelson at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Here you will find an exhibit of secondary criticism, bibliographic information, and external links on Randall Jarrell.

BIOGRAPHY

Randall Jarrell grew up in Los Angeles until his parents' divorce when he returned to Nashville the city of his birth. Tellingly, his Los Angeles experiences, especially his visit with his grandparents at the age of twelve, would be represented in the title piece of his last book of verse The Lost World. Supported in part by a National Youth Administration scholarship, Jarrell later attended college at Vanderbilt University where he was mentored by Robert Penn Warren, who published Jarrell's first poems, and John Crowe Ransom, who later hired Jarrell to teach Freshman Composition and to coach tennis at Kenyon College. At Kenyon, Jarrell befriended the emerging fiction writer Peter Taylor and, more importantly, the young student Robert Lowell, whose poetry Jarrell helped to encourage through his personal and professional criticism. After his time at Kenyon, Jarrell combined careers as poet, critic, and teacher. At the University of Texas, he married Mackie Langham in 1940 and then served in the Army Airforce teaching celestial navigation. Meanwhile, he published his first book of verse Blood for a Stranger (1942) and had success placing poems in The New Republic through his connection to the critic and editor Edmund Wilson. Jarrell's airforce experience would form the basis of two volumes of verse Little Friend, Little Friend (1945) and Losses (1948). In the postwar years, Jarrell served for a year as the literary editor of the Nation magazine and then taught at Sarah Lawrence College. His teaching experience there would be the subject of his humorous best-selling novel lampooning the fictional Benton College in Pictures from an Institution (1954). Two years previously, Jarrell had married his second wife Mary von Shrader and moved to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. At the same time, Jarrell was making a name for himself as an incisive and influential critic of modern American poetry with his best work collected in the volume Poetry and the Age (1953). His reputation as a poet, however, flowered later in the sixties when he won the National Book Award for The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960) and The Lost World (1965). Jarrell was also a translator from the German of Goethe's Faust, Part I and several of Grimm's fairy tales as well as a translation of Chekhov's The Three Sisters. In addition, he published four books of children's stories. Toward the end of his life Jarrell suffered from depression and attempted suicide by slashing his wrist. In the fall of 1965, he received treatment at a hospital in Chapel Hill and while walking on a highway close by he was struck and killed by a car.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Bryant, J.A. Understanding Randall Jarrell. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1986.

Flynn, Richard. Randall Jarrell and the Lost World of Childhood. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990.

Ferguson, Suzanne, Ed. Critical Essays on Randall Jarrell. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1983.

—. The Poetry of Randall Jarrell. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971.

Jarrell, Mary. Remembering Randall: a Memoir of Poet, Critic, and Teacher Randall Jarrell. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.

Pritchard, William H. Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990.

Wright, Stuart T. Randall Jarrell: A Descriptive Bibliography, 1929-1983. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER