Randall Jarrell (May 6, 1914 – October 14, 1965) was an American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, and novelist. He was the 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress—a position that now bears the title Poet Laureate of the United States.
Among other honors, Jarrell was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the years 1947–48; a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, in 1951; and the National Book Award for Poetry, in 1961.
Biography Youth and education Jarrell was a native of Nashville, Tennessee. He attended Hume-Fogg High School where he "practiced tennis, starred in some school plays, and began his career as a critic with satirical essays in a school magazine."Burt, Stephen. Randall Jarrell and His Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. He received his B.A. from Vanderbilt University in 1935. While at Vanderbilt, he edited the student humor magazine The Masquerader, was captain of the tennis team, made Phi Beta Kappa and graduated magna cum laude. He studied there under Robert Penn Warren, who first published Jarrell's criticism; Allen Tate, who first published Jarrell's poetry; and John Crowe Ransom, who gave Jarrell his first teaching job as a Freshman Composition instructor at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Although all of these Vanderbilt tutors were involved with the conservative Southern Agrarian movement, Jarrell did not become a supporter of the Agrarians himself. According to Stephanie Burt, "Jarrell—a devotee of Marx and Auden— embraced his teachers' literary stances while rejecting their politics." He also completed his master's degree in English at Vanderbilt in 1937, beginning his thesis on A. E. Housman (which he completed in 1939).
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 tennis, and served as the resident faculty member in an undergraduate dormitory that housed future writers Robie Macauley, Peter Taylor, and poet Robert Lowell. Lowell and Jarrell remained good friends and peers until Jarrell's death. According to Lowell biographer Paul Mariani, "Jarrell was the first person of [Lowell's] own generation [whom he] genuinely held in awe" due to Jarrell's brilliance and confidence even at the age of 23.Mariani, Paul. Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell. New York: Norton, 1994.
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.Jarrell, Randall, 1st Lieutenant, USAF 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.""Randall Jarrell, Poet, Killed By Car in Carolina". The New York Times 15 October 1965. His early poetry, in particular “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”, principally concerned 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 Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., for a year. During his time in New York, he also served as the temporary book review editor for The Nation magazine". Jarrell was uncomfortable living in the city and "claimed to hate New York's crowds, high cost of living, status-conscious sociability, and lack of greenery." He soon left the city for the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina where, as an associate professor of English, he taught modern poetry and "imaginative writing".
Jarrell divorced his first wife and married Mary von Schrader, a young woman whom he met at a summer writers' conference in Colorado, in 1952. They first lived together while Jarrell was teaching for a term at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The couple settled at Greensboro with Mary's daughters from her previous marriage. The couple also moved temporarily to Washington D.C. in 1956 when Jarrell served as the consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress (a position that later became titled Poet Laureate) for two years, returning to Greensboro and the University of North Carolina after his term ended.
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 President Kennedy was shot, Randall spent days in front of the television weeping. Sad to the point of inertia, Randall sought help from a Cincinnati psychiatrist, who prescribed [the antidepressant drug] Elavil." The drug made him manic and in 1965, he was hospitalized and taken off Elavil. At this point, he was no longer manic, but he became depressed again. Burt also states that in April The New York Times published a "viciously condescending" review by Joseph Bennett of Jarrell's most recent book of poems, The Lost World, which said "his work is thoroughly dated; prodigiousness encouraged by an indulgent and sentimental Mama-ism; its overriding feature is doddering infantilism."Ian Hamilton, "Ashamed of the Planet," London Review of Books, Vol. 22 No. 5, 2 March 2000, pp. 16–17. Soon afterwards, Jarrell slashed a wrist and returned to the hospital. After leaving the hospital, he stayed at home that summer under his wife's care and returned to teaching at the University of North Carolina that fall.
Near dusk on October 14, 1965, while walking along U.S. highway 15-501 near Chapel Hill, N.C., where he had gone seeking medical treatment, Jarrell was struck by a motorist and killed. In trying to determine the cause of death, "[Jarrell's wife] Mary, the police, the coroner, and ultimately the state of North Carolina judged his death accidental, a verdict made credible by his apparent improvements in health ... and the odd, sidelong manner of the collision; medical professionals judged the injuries consistent with an accident and not with suicide." Nevertheless, because Jarrell had recently been treated for mental illness and a previous suicide attempt, some of the people closest to him were not entirely convinced that his death was accidental and suspected that he had taken his own life.
In a letter to Elizabeth Bishop about a week after Jarrell's death, Robert Lowell wrote, "There's a small chance [that Jarrell's death] was an accident. . . [but] I think it was suicide, and so does everyone else, who knew him well."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. Jarrell's death being a suicide has since become accepted practically as fact, even by people who were not personally close to him, and perpetuated by some writers. A. Alvarez, in his book The Savage God, lists Jarrell as a twentieth-century writer who killed himself, and James Atlas refers to Jarrell's "suicide" several times in his biography of Delmore Schwartz. The idea of Jarrell's death being a suicide was always denied by his wife.Ferguson, Suzanne. "The Death of Randall Jarrell: A Problem in Legendary Biography." The Georgia Review 37.4 (1983): 866–876.
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.'"Gilroy, Harry. "Poets Honor Memory of Jarrell at Yale." The New York Times 1 March 1966. 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." 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.
Jarrell was first published in 1940 in 5 Young Poets, which also included work by John Berryman."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. His first separate collection of poetry, Blood for a Stranger, which was heavily influenced by W.H. Auden, was published in 1942 – the same year he enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps. His second and third books, Little Friend, Little Friend (1945) and Losses (1948), drew heavily on his Army experiences. The short lyric "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" is Jarrell's most famous war poem and one that is frequently anthologized.
His reputation as a poet was not firmly established until 1960 when his National Book Award-winning"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.) 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. The scholar Stephanie Burt notes, "Jarrell took from Wordsworth the idea that poems had to be 'convincing as speech' before they were anything else." 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." 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]."
Criticism