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93 RANDALL JARRELL 1914–1965 The poems of randall jarrell explore the lives of the comparatively powerless —children, holocaust victims, young soldiers whose lives are held as pawns of larger forces, or women struggling to claim a sense of identity in a man’s world. Their lines combine a sharp awareness of contemporary history, and an almost encyclopedic knowledge of Western literature and thought, with a childlike wonder at the world’s ambiguity and sorrow. Jarrell was a brilliant critic of the work of living poets, and as a reviewer he was widely feared for his witty and slashing style when he encountered poetry that in his judgment fell beneath the highest standards, but he also wrote with generous praise and prophetic insight about the work of such contemporaries and friends as Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, and John Berryman (all in this anthology), as well as such elders and mentors as Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and William Carlos Williams, and the British poet W. H. Auden. Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Jarrell spent important childhood years in Hollywood, California, where he observed the dawning of America’s cinematic culture, an experience that left a deep imprint on his imagination. Following his parents’ divorce, Jarrell returned to Nashville and attended Vanderbilt University , earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English while studying under poets Ransom and Tate. In 1937, Jarrell followed Ransom to Kenyon College, where he met and formed a lifelong bond with Robert Lowell. Jarrell was a gifted teacher and, following a stint at the University of Texas, served for many years on the faculty of the Women’s College of North Carolina (now the University of North Carolina–Greensboro). Jarrell served in the Army Air Force in World War II as a celestial navigation instructor. Many of his poems of World War II, such as “Losses” and “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” explore the painful situations faced by young airmen trained in modern combat and sent to war before they are old enough to fully comprehend the consequences of their dedication to “the State.” Others, such as “Protocols,” look sharply at genocide, and at the poignant suffering and confusion faced by children engulfed in worldwide conflict. Jarrell’s characteristic form was the dramatic monologue, and all of the poems so far named are voiced by fallen victims of World War II. In “Eighth Air Force,” the poet ponders the ambiguous moral universe inhabited by young airmen who—hoping to survive a war not of their own making—must pilot their lethal war machines and in the process cause the deaths of many people they have never known. Ø Randall Jarrell 94 In the 1950s Jarrell emerged as a noted author of books for children, and his postwar poetry often draws upon the dreamlike atmosphere of the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm (some of which Jarrell translated) to plumb the curious psychological depths of the parent-child relationship, and of the child’s half-bewildered confrontation with the mysteries of life, love, and death. Other poems, such as the dramatic monologues “The Woman at the Washington Zoo” and “Next Day,” explore, through women’s voices, the search of lonely individuals for identity as they articulate their longing for—and also their fear of—meaningful personal change. In 1964, Jarrell experienced a deep depression, and in 1965 he was struck by a car and killed in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, while walking alongside a roadway at night. Although the coroner ruled the death accidental, many of his close friends, including Lowell and Berryman, considered it a suicide, or perhaps it was, as Bishop phrased it, “an accident of an unconscious-suicide kind . . .—because surely it was most unlike him to make some innocent motorist responsible for his death.” Jarrell left behind him a body of poetry and of criticism marked by sharp intelligence and by a willingness to take emotional risks and to explore political, moral, and psychological depths. further reading Stephen Burt. Randall Jarrell and His Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Suzanne Ferguson, ed. Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, and Co.: Middle Generation Poets in Context. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. Richard Flynn. Randall Jarrell and the Lost World of Childhood. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990. Jerome Griswold. The Children’s Books of Randall Jarrell. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988. Mary Jarrell. Remembering Randall: A Memoir of Poet, Critic, and Teacher. New York: HarperCollins , 1999. Randall...

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