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;...

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