Randall Jarrell (1914-1965). Biography and creative work

The bushy salt-and-pepper beard and soulful eyes in Randall Jarrell’s later photographs portray the scholarly and artistic wisdom he accumulated during a life of writing and teaching. Unfortunately, Jarrell died at the premature age of 51. One of the leading critics of his age, Jarrell often wrote witty and at times bitter reviews that delighted some readers and angered others. Jarrell’s sharp insight and keen intelligence as a teacher, poet, literary critic, translator, editor, and author of children’s books were tethered to childlike hopes and fears that chased him in his personal life and drove him to find answers through his art. Jarrell’s early years were marked by an insecurity and sadness that plagued him through his adulthood.

This profound sorrow can be felt in poems such as “90 North” (1940), “Next Day” (1942), and The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960). Throughout his life Jarrell would attempt to describe, resolve, and rise above the underlying emotional flatness that characterized both his childhood and his adulthood. With great sensitivity and an often dark outlook on life, he wrote about childhood, war, illness, animals, books, loneliness, and, above all, loss: lost children, lost love, lost lives, and a lost world.

On May 6, 1914, just two months before the outbreak of World War I, Randall Jarrell was born. Jarrell’s family moved from Nashville, Tennessee, to his paternal grandparents’ home in California when he was just a year old. His parents separated in 1925; Jarrell stayed with his beloved grandparents before returning to Nashville to live with his mother. During the time that Jarrell stayed with his father’s parents and his great-grandmother in California, he wrote pain-filled letters to his mother in Nashville. Late in life his mother returned these letters, and they formed the basis for “The Lost World” and “Thinking of the Lost World” (1965).

We can see the persistent loneliness of his childhood through the speaker and themes in poems such as “The Lost World” (1962), where “Mama” and “Pop” represent his grandparents and “Anna” his mother. He also returned to his youth in a series of children’s books he wrote, including The Bat-Poet (1964) and The Animal Family (1965), which was dedicated to his beloved cat. When Jarrell moved back to Nashville at age 12, his mother worked as an English teacher, and her brother, Howell Campbell, helped support his nephews. Randall was a gifted student who did well at Hume-Hogg High School, where he contributed to the school’s yearbook, The Echo. During this time he enjoyed open access to one of the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie’s libraries in Nashville. This early love of libraries would find full expression between 1956 and 1958 when Jarrell accepted the post of consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, and in a number of his “library” poems including “Carnegie Library, Juvenile Division” (1942).

Thanks to the generous patronage of his uncle, Howell Campbell, Jarrell attended nearby Vanderbilt University in 1932 and completed his undergraduate degree in 1935, taking classes during summer sessions at George Peabody College. Graduating with a degree in psychology, Jarrell integrated Sigmund Freud’s theories into the themes of his poetry, which foreshadowed his future emotional struggles. His time at Vanderbilt would influence the course of his work and friendships for the rest of his life, especially his connection with the professor, poet, and Rhodes scholar John Crowe Ransom. While at Vanderbilt, Jarrell edited a humor magazine, The Masquerader, which also published works by his teachers, including Ransom, Allen Tate, and the future Rhodes scholar and Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Penn Warren (All the King’s Men 1946).

The first of Jarrell’s 35 poems published between 1934 and 1940, “Five Poems,” was included in the American Review, a journal published by the American fascist Seward Collins; the journal also published works by Warren, Ransom, and Tate. This group of Jarrell’s mentors, who were not fascists and did not support Hitler or nazism, cofounded and edited one of Vanderbilt’s most influential publications, the Fugitive, in which they examined southern life in their poetry and essays. Later they joined with nine other academics to contribute essays to the conservative antimodernist manifesto I’ll Take My Stand (1930), which provided an alternative to what they warned was the destruction of southern culture by industrialization. Despite the encouragement and inspiration the southern agrarians and fugitive poets provided, Jarrell showed little interest in southern political and cultural ideas.

Jarrell continued with graduate studies at Vanderbilt and planned on writing his master’s thesis on the poetry of the 30-year-old W. H. Auden. Donald Davidson, however, another fugitive poet and contributor to I’ll Take My Stand, advised him to write about a more established and less contemporary poet, A. E. Houseman. In 1937, when Robert Frost recommended John Crowe Ransom to the president of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, Ransom left Vanderbilt despite Jarrell’s and other students’ protests. At Kenyon, Ransom served as professor of poetry and as founding editor of a distinguished and influential literary publication, the Kenyon Review. Jarrell and Tate left Vanderbilt to follow Ransom to Kenyon College, where Jarrell’s political poem “The Winter’s Tale” was included in one of the Kenyon Review’s earliest issues (1940).

At Kenyon, Randall taught English part-time, coached sports, and completed his thesis, “Implicit Generalization in Houseman,” which earned his master’s degree in English from Vanderbilt in 1938. Robert Lowell, a rising, though emotionally erratic young poet, left his own undergraduate studies at Harvard to study under Ransom at Vanderbilt. Lowell and Randall became lifelong friends and collaborators after rooming together at Ransom’s house, later befriending a fiction writer who would become Jarrell’s best friend, Peter Taylor (A Summons to Memphis, 1985 Pulitzer Prize).

These friendships survived world war, mental illness, and divorces, eventually inspiring a collection of posthumous tributes to Jarrell edited by Lowell, Taylor, and Warren. While Jarrell was at Kenyon College, his girlfriend at Vanderbilt, Amy Breyer, unexpectedly ended their relationship and married a young surgeon. The emotional fallout of that troubled relationship and the abrupt breakup inspired numerous poems, such as “On the Railway Platform” (1940). When Robert Penn Warren joined another fugitive poet, Cleanth Brooks, on the faculty of Louisiana State University’s English Department, Warren and Brooks published Jarrell’s poetry in the Southern Review (1934), in which Jarrell also won a poetry contest in 1935.

After completing his master’s degree, Jarrell accepted a position at the University of Texas in Austin, where he met his first wife, Mackie Langham, a member of the English Department. They married in 1940, the same year a collection of 20 previously unpublished poems, “The Rage for the Lost Penny,” appeared in Five Young American Poets. Jarrell published his first book of poems, Blood for a Stranger (1942), at the age of 28 just prior to his enlistment in the army. Dedicated to his former professor, Allen Tate, the collection included “A Picture in the Paper,” “For an Emigrant,” “A Story,” and “The Refugees.” The collection was also reproduced in the New York Times with a complimentary review: “There is shown not only sensitivity and talent, but that power of working at his art which is one of the signs of a real poet” (1942).

Though Jarrell was unable to fly for the air force, he was ultimately deployed to an Army Air Corps base in Arizona, where he served as a celestial navigation training operator for B-29 pilots until 1946. During his four years of military service Jarrell wrote to his wife daily and corresponded regularly with Lowell, Taylor, and Tate, often chronicling army life and his views on the politics of war. In 1945 he also published his second collection of poems, Little Friend, Little Friend, which distinguished him as a noteworthy American war poet. Influenced by Wilfred Owens and Siegfried Sassoon, British poets of World War I, Jarrell depicted the horrors of war in such poems as “Losses,” “Protocols,” “Second Air Force,” and “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”—his most famous poem.

After he was discharged from military service, Jarrell taught for one year at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. In 1946 he won the Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, enabling him to concentrate solely on writing during 1948 and 1949. During that time, Taylor invited him to join him on the faculty of the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina (now University of North Carolina at Greensboro [UNCG]). Jarrell remained on the faculty at UNCG for the remainder of his life, also serving as a visiting professor at Princeton University, the University of Illinois, and the University of Cincinnati.

In 1948 Jarrell published a second collection of war poetry, Losses, and in 1951 published The Seven-League Crutches. In the summer of that year, while at a writers’ conference at the University of Colorado, Jarrell met Mary von Schrader, who would become his wife and intellectual partner in 1952, just days after his divorce from Mackie. Influenced by the method that Jarrell’s mentors established to evaluate their own poetry during their weekly discussion groups, Jarrell learned to read and analyze literature closely. This method of close reading later became known as the New Criticism. Yet Jarrell distanced himself from this critical school in his own artful literary criticism. Compiling essays he had previously published in literary journals edited by his former mentors, Jarrell published them as Poetry and the Age (1953). Through these essays he gained recognition as a brilliant and accomplished literary critic.

In 1961 Jarrell received the National Book Award in poetry for his autobiographical The Woman at the Washington Zoo. A final book of poetry, The Lost World, about lost childhood, was published in 1965. Jarrell’s lone piece of prose fiction, Pictures from an Institution, a satire of academic life loosely based on his time at Sarah Lawrence College, was published in 1951. His literary life included the publication of numerous works of literary criticism, translations, fairy tales, and children’s stories that earned him the Levinson Prize (1948), Oscar Blumenthal Prize (1951), O. Max Gardner Award (1962), and Ingram-Merrill Literary Award (1962). He also edited prestigious literary publications including the Yale Review.

Doubts remain over the circumstances of Randall Jarrell’s death on 14 October 1965. The New York Times printed a North Carolina state trooper’s statement that “witnesses reported that the victim had ‘lunged into the side of the car that struck him.’ ‘We are going on the assumption that it was suicide’” (20). Despite this initial report, his death was ultimately ruled as accidental. During his final year, Jarrell experienced a series of health-related problems that resulted in medication changes.

These changes caused personality aberrations ranging from hyperelation to depression, for which he was hospitalized. He returned home in July 1964 to resume teaching and planned trips abroad and future literary and critical works. As Jarrell walked home alone along a rural highway in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on October 14, 1965, the life of the beloved teacher, gifted critic, and talented poet was tragically cut short.