Randall Jarrell
Randall Jarrell | |
---|---|
U.S. | |
Occupation |
|
Notable works | The Woman at the Washington Zoo, The Lost World, Pictures from an Institution |
Notable awards | National Book Award |
Randall Jarrell
Among other honors, Jarrell was awarded a
Biography
Youth and education
Jarrell was a native of
When Ransom left Vanderbilt for Kenyon College in Ohio that same year, a number of his loyal students, including Jarrell, followed him to Kenyon. Jarrell taught English at Kenyon for two years, coached
Career
Jarrell went on to teach at the University of Texas at Austin from 1939 to 1942, where he began to publish criticism and where he met his first wife, Mackie Langham. In 1942 he left the university to join the United States Army Air Forces.[4] According to 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."[5] His early poetry, in particular The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, would principally concern his wartime experiences in the Air Force.
The Jarrell obituary goes on to state that "after being discharged from the service he joined the faculty of
Jarrell divorced his first wife and married Mary von Schrader, a young woman whom he met at a summer writer's conference in Colorado, in 1952.
Depression and death
Towards the end of his life, in 1963, Stephanie Burt notes: "Randall's behavior began to change. Approaching his fiftieth birthday, he seems to have worried deeply about his advancing age. . . After
Then, near dusk on October 14, 1965, while walking along U.S. highway 15-501 near
In a letter to
Legacy
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.'"[9] These memorial tributes formed the basis for the book Randall Jarrell 1914-1965 which Farrar, Straus and Giroux published the following year.
In 2004, the Metropolitan Nashville Historical Commission approved placement of a historical marker in his honor, to be placed at his alma mater, Hume-Fogg High School. A North Carolina Highway Historical Marker was placed near his burial site in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Writing
Poetry
In terms of the subject matter of Jarrell's work, the scholar Stephanie Burt observed, "Randall Jarrell's best-known poems are poems about the Second World War, poems about bookish children and childhood, and poems, such as 'Next Day,' in the voices of aging women."[1] Burt also succinctly summarizes the essence of Jarrell's poetic style as follows:
Jarrell's stylistic particularities have been hard for critics to hear and describe, both because the poems call readers' attention instead to their characters and because Jarrell's particular powers emerge so often from mimesis of speech. Jarrell's style responds to the alienations it delineates by incorporating or troping speech and conversation, linking emotional events within one person's psyche to speech acts that might take place between persons. . .Jarrell's style pivots on his sense of loneliness and on the intersubjectivity he sought as a response.[1]
Jarrell was first published in 1940 in 5 Young Poets, which also included work by John Berryman.
His reputation as a poet was not firmly established until 1960 when his National Book Award-winning[11] collection The Woman at the Washington Zoo was published. Beginning with this book, Jarrell broke free of Auden's influence and the influence of the New Critics and developed a style that mixed Modernist and Romantic influences, incorporating the aesthetics of William Wordsworth in order to create more sympathetic character sketches and dramatic monologues.[1] The scholar Stephanie Burt notes, "Jarrell took from Wordsworth the idea that poems had to be 'convincing as speech' before they were anything else."[1] His final volume, The Lost World, published in 1965, continued in the same style and cemented Jarrell's reputation as a poet; many critics consider it to be his best work. Stephanie Burt states that "in the 'Lost World' poems and throughout Jarrell's oeuvre. . .he took care to define and defend the self [and]. . .his lonely personae seek intersubjective confirmation and . . .his alienated characters resist the so-called social world."[1] Burt identifies the chief influences on Jarrell's poetry to be "Proust, Wordsworth, Rilke, Freud, and the poets and thinkers of Jarrell's era [particularly his close friend, Hannah Arendt]."[1]
Criticism
From the start of his writing career, Jarrell earned a solid reputation as an influential poetry critic. Encouraged by Edmund Wilson, who published Jarrell's criticism in The New Republic, Jarrell developed his style of critique which was often witty and sometimes fiercely critical. However, as he got older, 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."[12] 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."[13]
Jarrell is known 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 poet and scholar Peter Levi went so far as to advise younger writers, "Take more notice of Randall Jarrell than you do of any academic critic."[14]
In an introduction to a selection of Jarrell's essays, the poet
Fiction, translations, and children's books
In addition to poetry and criticism, Jarrell also published a satiric novel,
Bibliography
- Blood for A Stranger. NY: Harcourt, 1942.[16]
- 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.
- Randall Jarrell's Book of Stories: An Anthology. Selected and with an introduction by Randall Jarrell. NY: New York Review Books, 1958.
- 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 Gingerbread Rabbit. Illustrated by Garth Williams. NY: Random House, 1965
- 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, Straus, and Giroux, 1968.[17]
- The Third Book of Criticism. NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969.
- The Three Sisters by Chekhov, (translator & editor). Macmillan Co., 1969.
- The Complete Poems. NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969.[18]
- Fly by Night. Illustrated by Maurice Sendak. NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976.
- Faust: Part One by Goethe, (translator). Farrah, 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. eds. 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.
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Burt, Stephen. Randall Jarrell and His Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
- ^ McAlexander, Hugh, "Peter Taylor: The Undergraduate Years at Kenyon," The Kenyon Review, New Series, Vol. 21, No. 3/4 (Summer - Autumn, 1999), pp. 43-57
- ^ Mariani, Paul. Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell. New York: Norton, 1994.
- ^ Jarrell, Randall, 1st Lieutenant, USAF
- ^ a b c "Randall Jarrell, Poet, Killed By Car in Carolina." The New York Times 15 October 1965.
- ^ Ian Hamilton, "Ashamed of the Planet," London Review of Books, Vol. 22 No. 5, 2 March 2000, pages 16-17.
- ^ Lowell, Robert. "To Elizabeth Bishop." 28 October 1965. Letter 464 in The Letters of Robert Lowell. Ed. Saskia Hamilton. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005. 465.
- ^ Ferguson, Suzanne. "The Death of Randall Jarrell: A Problem in Legendary Biography." The Georgia Review 37.4 (1983): 866-876.
- ^ Gilroy, Harry. "Poets Honor Memory of Jarrell at Yale." The New York Times 1 March 1966.
- ^ "5 Young Poets," published in 1940 by New Directions, contained forty pages of poems by each of the following poets: Mary Barnard, George Marion O'Donnell, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, and W. R. Moses.
- ^
"National Book Awards – 1961". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-02.
(With acceptance speech by Jarrell and essay by Scott Challener from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.) - ^ 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.[1]
- ^ Leithauser, Brad. Introduction. No Other Book: Selected Essays. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.
- ^ Featured Author: Randall Jarrell, with News and Reviews From the Archives of The New York Times
- ^ Julian Moynahan, "Master of Modern Plain", New York Times, September 3, 1967
- ^ Helen Vendler, "Randall Jarrell, Child and Mother, Frightened and Consoling," New York Times, February 2, 1969
External links
- 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
- Jarrell on the New York Times Featured Authors site
- News of historical marker
- Randall Jarrell Papers (#1169-005), East Carolina Manuscript Collection, J. Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University
- Randall Jarrell at Library of Congress, with 84 library catalog records