SOURCE: Carruth, Hayden. Review of The Complete Poems, by Randall Jarrell. Nation 209 (7 July 1969): 19-20.

In the following review of The Complete Poems, Carruth appraises Jarrell's poetic sensibility and works, observing that his war poems are his finest and that in them Jarrell successfully leaps from “romantic agony to genuine tragic vision.”

Randall Jarrell was a romanticist of the generation which came to adulthood during the miserable 1930s in a society whose most active intellectual centers were dominated by the thought and style of T. S. Eliot and, behind him, of Irving Babbitt. Jarrell reacted as did the others. He launched into a search for a way out of the social and cultural order which seemed to him, and which was, superannuated. More than this, he launched—in spite of his Southern politesse, for he was born in Nashville and graduated from Vanderbilt—with an eagerness that was virtually...