Randall Jarrell Biography Quotes 11 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Randall Jarrell was born on May 6, 1914, in Nashville, Tennessee. His childhood included moves between the South and California after his parents separated, an unsettled pattern that sharpened his attention to the inner lives and vulnerabilities of children and adults alike. In school he excelled at languages and literature, and by the time he entered Vanderbilt University he had already begun to shape the wit, empathy, and technical command that would mark his poetry and criticism.

At Vanderbilt he encountered the circle of poets and critics associated with the Fugitives and the New Criticism. John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren were formative figures for him, their seminars and example offering a demanding model of close reading, formal discipline, and intellectual severity. The rigorous attention to prosody and form that Jarrell absorbed from these mentors would underpin his early poems as well as his mature criticism. After completing his studies, he followed Ransom to Kenyon College, where teaching and literary discussion intertwined with a community of ambitious young writers.

Early Career and Wartime Service
At Kenyon, Jarrell began his life as a teacher and critic, and he formed friendships with writers who would matter greatly to him, including Robert Lowell and the fiction writer Peter Taylor. He published reviews and poems in leading journals and brought out his first book, Blood for a Stranger, in 1942. The directness and dramatic monologues that would become his signature were already present, but the war years would deepen his sense of the precariousness of human life.

Jarrell served in the United States Army Air Forces during the Second World War. Though he did not fly combat missions, his training and service put him close to the routines and risks of air warfare. The poems he wrote during and immediately after the war, collected in volumes such as Little Friend, Little Friend and Losses, turned military life into stark, compassionate narratives. The brief, harrowing lyric The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner became one of the most widely anthologized American war poems, a compressed emblem of the mechanized fatality that haunted his imagination.

Teacher, Critic, and Poet
After the war Jarrell resumed teaching, first at institutions in the Northeast and then, for the longest stretch of his career, at the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (now UNCG). There he developed a devoted following of students and colleagues, known for a pedagogy that combined high standards with an almost theatrical gift for reading poems aloud. The classroom was an extension of his criticism, and his criticism an extension of his classroom: every page sought to make a poem or a novelist present and alive.

As a reviewer for venues such as The Nation, The Kenyon Review, and Partisan Review, he became one of the midcentury's most influential poet-critics. The essays collected in Poetry and the Age showed his capacity to illuminate individual poems while articulating large claims about the conditions of modern writing. He championed poets he believed had been misunderstood or neglected, including Elizabeth Bishop, whose precision and reticence he prized; he wrote with discerning admiration about Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams; and he responded passionately to the struggles of contemporaries like Robert Lowell and John Berryman. His criticism could be piercing, but it was also hospitable, attempting to welcome readers into a work rather than fence them out with jargon.

Fiction and Writing for Children
Jarrell's literary range extended beyond poetry and criticism. His novel Pictures from an Institution (1954) is a sparkling, acerbic comedy of academic life, distilled from his experiences as a visiting teacher and his shrewd observation of literary circles. The book remains a classic of the campus novel, praised for its aphoristic brilliance and its vivid portraits. Readers have long recognized in one of its figures a satirical likeness of Mary McCarthy, a sign of how closely Jarrell's fictional world tracked the personalities of the postwar American literary scene.

Late in his career he wrote for children with a tenderness that mirrors the empathy of his poems. The Bat-Poet and The Animal Family, among his best-known books for younger readers, were illustrated by Maurice Sendak and offer gentle meditations on craft, companionship, and imagination. Their tone is unmistakably Jarrell's: patient, exact, and attentive to the feelings of beings who do not quite fit into the worlds around them.

Personal Life and Literary Friendships
Jarrell married twice. His first marriage ended in divorce, and in the early 1950s he married Mary von Schrader, who became an essential partner in his life and work. Mary Jarrell later preserved and contextualized his legacy, offering readers a portrait of the man behind the poems and essays. Among his closest literary relationships were his long conversation with Robert Lowell, his advocacy of Elizabeth Bishop, and his connections to John Berryman and Caroline Gordon. These friendships were not only personal but also professional: Jarrell's reviews and introductions could change the critical weather for a book or a poet, and his letters reveal an intense, often humorous engagement with the art of his peers.

He also brought European literature into his ambit through translation and criticism, notably rendering poems by Rainer Maria Rilke into English with a fidelity to tone and feeling that reflected his belief that translation is a form of reading at the highest pitch. His capacity to inhabit another writer's voice without flattening its strangeness parallels the dramatic monologues of his own verse.

Honors and Public Service
In the mid-1950s Jarrell served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, the position now known as United States Poet Laureate. The appointment recognized not only his poems but also the authority of his criticism and his commitment to public literary conversation. He lectured widely, judged prizes, and helped bring younger poets to the attention of a national audience. Though he never cultivated a celebrity persona, his influence permeated American letters through his editorial work, his teaching, and his essays.

Themes, Style, and Achievement
Jarrell's poems are distinguished by their dramatic immediacy and moral clarity. He often wrote in the voices of isolated or overlooked figures: soldiers, children, women in ordinary settings whose inner lives burn with stifled longing. The Woman at the Washington Zoo, a collection that gathered some of his finest middle-period work, crystallizes his gift for revealing the extraordinary within the seemingly everyday. In a literary era that alternated between forbidding abstraction and confessional exposure, Jarrell found a path that balanced psychological insight with formal grace.

As a critic, he resisted systems and slogans. Instead, he modeled a kind of criticism that was personal without being self-centered, learned without ostentation, and passionate without cruelty. His essays on Bishop, Frost, and Stevens remain touchstones for readers who want to see how sympathetic imagination and exact analysis can coexist. Among his recurrent themes were the pressures of modern society on the individual spirit, the consolations and dangers of art, and the complex consolations available in humor.

Later Years and Death
In the 1960s Jarrell contended with episodes of depression and the exhaustion that can come with years of teaching, reviewing, and writing on tight deadlines. Even as he struggled, he continued to produce strong work and to mentor younger writers. On October 14, 1965, he was struck by a car near Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and died of his injuries. The death prompted painful speculation about his intentions, but the official ruling was that it was an accident. Friends and family, including Mary Jarrell and Robert Lowell, mourned a figure who had seemed to hold, in equal measure, exacting standards and an immense capacity for sympathy.

Legacy
Jarrell's legacy is twofold. As a poet, he left a compact but resonant body of work whose best pieces, especially the wartime lyrics and the domestic monologues, continue to be taught and anthologized for their clarity and pathos. As a critic, he reshaped the reputations of his contemporaries and set a standard for literary journalism that blends close reading with imaginative understanding. The campus novel he wrote still sparkles, and his children's books retain a quiet magic, thanks in part to his collaboration with Maurice Sendak.

Institutions he served, especially the Woman's College in Greensboro and the Library of Congress, have preserved his place in American literary history, while Mary Jarrell's stewardship and the memories of friends such as Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell have kept his voice present in accounts of the period. For readers and writers who want to see how art can be at once exact and humane, Randall Jarrell remains a model: a poet of conscience, a critic of uncommon tact, and a teacher who believed that literature could clarify and console the lives we actually live.

Our collection contains 11 quotes who is written by Randall, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Writing - Honesty & Integrity - Poetry - Sarcastic.