Biography Essay

Best known for his poetry of World War II and his incisive, memorably witty criticism, Randall Jarrell belonged to the second generation of American modernist poets. Like Robert Lowell and John Berryman—contemporaries and personal friends—he worked in his early years in the shadow of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, gradually freeing his poetry from their influence in order to write his own characteristic work. Although educated in the South and a student in the early 1930s of Fugitive poets John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren at Vanderbilt University—where he also associated with Alien Tate—Jarrell was a poet of midcentury American urban and suburban life, a confirmed Freudian in his view of personality and creativity, a Marxist in his interpretation of history, a liberal in politics. Though interested in modern theology, he was not religious; he wrote to...