Criticism > Poetry > Jarrell, Randall - Robert Lowell (essay dates 1957 and 1965)

Jarrell, Randall - Robert Lowell (essay dates 1957 and 1965)

Robert Lowell (essay dates 1957 and 1965)

SOURCE: Lowell, Robert. “Randall Jarrell.” In Robert Lowell: Collected Prose, edited by Robert Giroux, pp. 87-98. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987.

[In the following essays, “On the Seven–League Crutches,” originally published in 1957, and “Randall Jarell, 1914–1965,” originally published in 1965, Lowell favorably reviews Jarrell's The Seven-League Crutches, and presents a reminiscence of Jarrell as a poet, critic, and friend.]

I / ON THE SEVEN-LEAGUE CRUTCHES

Randall Jarrell is our most talented poet under forty, and one whose wit, pathos, and grace remind us more of Pope or Matthew Arnold than of any of his contemporaries. I don't know whether Jarrell is unappreciated or not—it's hard to imagine anyone taking him lightly. He is almost brutally serious about literature and so bewilderingly gifted that it is impossible to comment on him without the...

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