Randall Jarrell (1914-1965), poet and critic, was one of the most versatile American men of letters during the two decades immediately after World War II.

Randall Jarrell was born June 6, 1914, in Nashville, Tennessee, but spent most of his early years on the West Coast, in Long Beach and Hollywood, California. His troubled, lonely childhood is reflected in some of his most vivid poems. When he was 11 his parents separated, and he lived for a time with his father's parents before joining his mother back in Nashville. He took business courses in high school, but as a student at Vanderbilt he came under the influence of John Crowe Ransom, with Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren one of the leaders of an earlier Southern poetry renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s.

Jarrell's early poetry was largely shaped by a continuing relationship with Ransom. He took bachelor's and master's degrees...