Jarrell, Randall (Vol. 2) - Jarrell, Randall 1914–1965
Jarrell, Randall 1914–1965
An American poet, novelist, and critic, Jarrell is remembered for his World War II poems and his novel, Pictures from an Institution. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 5-8, rev. ed.; obituary, Vols. 25-28.)
The intelligence and the humanity [that inform Jarrell's poems] are not bland or neutral; they are spotted and streaked with the unexpected, the idiosyncratic, even the quixotic and contradictory. Jarrell, both as man and poet, commits himself willingly to experience as a thing often not to be understood rationally yet always to be curiously examined and tested on one's own terms….
[Despite his] preoccupation with suffering and death, [the] sad conviction that as "The Place of Death" concludes, "'Only man is miserable,'" Jarrell's poems in Losses and his other mature books are not depressing when taken as a whole…. [Though] Jarrell is often ironic, he is much less frequently satiric;...
[The entire page is 5391 words long]
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