An intimidating perfectionist wedded to compassionate humanism, Randall Jarrell (pronounced juh rehl) combined the talents of author, translator, and strident critic. Like poet-critic T. S. Eliot, he earned the respect of his elders, including poets John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Marianne Moore. Essentially shy and soft-spoken before an audience, he gained a reputation for impassioned public readings, zippy sports cars, delight in fairy tales, and fierce public debates on the status of modern poetry, including that of Allen Ginsberg and the Beat generation.
Jarrell maintained his Tennessee mountaineer’s decorum and naïveté by refusing alcohol, tobacco, gossip, and racy talk. He was born on May 6, 1914, in Nashville and spent his childhood in Hollywood, California. After the divorce of his parents, he returned to his hometown at age 12 to live with his grandparents. Although he majored in psychology in his undergraduate years at Vanderbilt University, he studied under Fugitive Agrarians John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren and demonstrated a remarkable intellectual range and gift for language and analysis. He completed an M.A. in English in 1938 and taught at Kenyon College until 1939, when he joined the faculty of the University of Texas and married his first wife, Mackie Langham.
Influenced by the plain-spoken truths of Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Williams, Jarrell published verse in Five American Poets (1940) before producing his own collection, Blood for a Stranger (1942). Then World War II intervened in his career. He served for three years as an army flying instructor and tower operator. He regretted that he was too old for combat, but nevertheless turned his wartime experience to advantage in Little Friend, Little Friend (1945) and Losses (1948). From 1949 to 1951, he edited poetry for Partisan Review, establishing a reputation for truth-telling evaluations at whatever cost to fellow poets.
The mature stage of his career included publication of a series of pro-Frost, pro-Whitman critical essays in Poetry and the Age (1953). Less successful was a satirical novel, Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy (1954), a witty putdown of academic life. His most famous works appeared in The Seven-League Crutches (1951); Selected Poems (1955); The Woman at the Washington Zoo: Poems and Translations (1960), winner of a National Book Award; and The Lost World (1966). He displayed the whimsical side of his nature in the playful children’s works The Gingerbread Rabbit (1963), The Bat-Poet (1964), The Animal Family (1965), and Fly by Night (1976).
On October 14, 1965, while in Chapel Hill at UNC’s Memorial Hospital undergoing a skin graft on his hand, Jarrell stepped in front of a car, leaving unsettled whether his death was accidental or self-inflicted. Complicating the coroner’s task were Jarrell’s hospitalization earlier that year for manic-depression and episodes of death wish. Issued posthumously were The Complete Poems (1969) and two essay collections, The Third Book of Criticism (1969) and Kipling, Auden & Co. (1980). Colleagues Robert Lowell, Peter Taylor, and Robert Penn Warren mourned Jarrell’s abrupt death with a collection of tributes, Randall Jarrell, 1914–1965 (1967). In 1985, his widow edited Jarrell’s Letters: An Autobiographical and Literary Selection.
