Poetry Criticism | Jarrell, Randall - David Bottoms (essay date 1984)

David Bottoms (essay date 1984)

SOURCE: Bottoms, David. “The Messy Humanity of Randall Jarrell: His Poetry in the Eighties.” South Carolina Review 17, no. 1 (fall 1984): 82-95.

[In the following essay, Bottoms stresses the enduring appeal of Jarrell's poetry.]

I

I first encountered the poetry of Randall Jarrell in a freshman literature class at Mercer University. The text, I believe, was X. J. Kennedy's An Introduction to Poetry, and the poem was “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.” The assignment our instructor gave us was to write an essay in which we compared Jarrell's poem to Wilfred Owen's “Dulce Et Decorum Est.” I was seventeen or eighteen years old, not much of a student, less of a writer, and for me that was a fairly demanding task. I don't remember what I wrote in that essay, something obvious about two different kinds of warfare and two different poetic approaches, but I do remember sitting up all...

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