In the following essay, Quinn traces Jarrell's poetic development through his depiction of landscape in verse.

In the following essay, Longenbach affirms Jarrell's so-called “semifeminine” poetic sensibility.

In the following excerpt, originally delivered as a lecture in 1942, Jarrell explains his aesthetics of poetic structure, emphasizing temporality, a struggle of opposites, and a dialectical tension of elements as the fundamental qualities of poetry.

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

In the following essay, Hammer chronicles Jarrell's career as a postwar American poet, concentrating on his attempts to reassess the poetic values of his generation.

In the following essay, Humphrey regards Jarrell as a greatly under appreciated poet of the mid-twentieth century.

In the following essay, Vardamis studies Jarrell's poetic representations of war and the fate of the solitary airman.

In the following review, Carruth responds to W. S. Graham's negative appraisal of Losses, vindicating Jarrell by attacking Graham's limited definition of poetry.

In the following essay, Hill discusses Jarrell's war poem “A Front” using experiential input from several U.S. airmen.

In the following essay, Nitchie presents a personal appraisal of Jarrell's poetry that emphasizes the poet's humanity.

In the following essay, Lensing probes Jarrell's relationship to the Modernist poetic tradition.

In the following essay, Cross centers on Jarrell's poetic fascination with all things German.

In the following essay, Quinn considers five images—dream, wish, child, mirror, and star—as they combine to give thematic unity to the lyrics of Jarrell's Complete Poems.

If we hope to avoid simple thematizing of Jarrell's work, and also to get beyond the respectable (and even appropriate) confusions of most readings, then a useful point of departure lies in Jarrell's own critical writings. His essay "Stories," perhaps the most interesting prose piece he ever wrote, is remarkable primarily for its unwillingness to yield to any of the dead-ended perplexities and simplifications that are ever-present dangers in the act of reading. "Stories,&#...

In the following essay, Flint calls Jarrell “the poet of the war” and briefly surveys his World War II pieces.

In the following essay, Chappell illuminates the figure of the alienated child in Jarrell's verse.

In the following essay, Mazzaro views Jarrell as a talented but secondary poet, and draws analogies between his status and that of Matthew Arnold.

In the following essay, Travisano remarks on Jarrell's 1942 lecture “Levels and Opposites: Structure in Poetry” (first published in 1996), and discusses his status as a literary critic.

In [Jarrell's] poems there is at times a false current of sentimental condescension toward his subjects, especially when they are female. But more often another current carries us toward a realization of the ineradicable innocence and pity of the common life in all its alienating reality. This current did not really show itself, as a directive element in Jarrell's art, until the war poems of his second volume. In the first, Blood for a Stranger, some of his major themes were visible but neithe...

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.”

In the following review of Losses, Graham finds the poems of Jarrell's third collection banal, incidental, vague, and disappointing.

In the following review of Blood for a Stranger, Cowley enumerates Jarrell's debts to various poets from W. B. Yeats to Hart Crane, while admiring the strengths of his verse.

In the following review of Losses, Spender compares Jarrell's poetry to that of the Victorians Lord Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, while also emphasizing the distinctly American and modern quality of Jarrell's work.

In the following review of The Complete Poems, Deen highlights Jarrell's principal poetic themes of change and judgment.

In the following excerpt, Greene largely focuses on the war-inspired pieces of Jarrell's Collected Poems, noting their successful representation of the depersonalizing anonymity of war, while acknowledging failures of dramatic obscurity and empty abstraction in some of the works.

In the following essay, the critics elucidate the allusions, ironies, and balance of “hopefulness and utter despair” in Jarrell's poem “The Emancipators.”

In the following review of The Woman at the Washington Zoo, Hall faults Jarrell for poetic sentimentality, even when it is combined with brutality.

[Randall Jarrell is a poet] 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 humiliating thought that he himself could do it better. He is a man of letters in the European sense, with real verve, imagination...

[Poetry and the Age] is, I believe, the most original and best book on its subject since The Double Agent by R. P. Blackmur and Primitivism and Decadence by Yvor Winters…. It does not, indeed, contain [Jarrell's] most plunging criticism so far, which will be found in his articles and reviews and lectures on Auden, whose mind Jarrell understands better than anyone ought to be allowed to understand anyone else's, especially anyone so pleasant and destructive as Jarrell; these will make an...

In the following essay, Richards interprets the poem “Seele im Raum” as it universalizes a form of ontological psychosis.