SOURCE: Lensing, George S. “The Modernism of Randall Jarrell.” South Carolina Review 17, no. 1 (fall 1984): 52-60.

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

Randall Jarrell's first collection of poems appeared under the title “The Rage for the Lost Penny” in a New Directions publication entitled Five Young American Poets. The book appeared in 1940. Jarrell was represented by twenty poems; he was twenty-six years old. As a student he had already been instructed by Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, and Donald Davidson. He knew Allen Tate well and had shared living accommodations with another young poet, Robert Lowell, at Kenyon College. (Lowell was three years younger than Jarrell.) In short, for a young Tennesseean with heady literary ambition, his grounding in modernism was thoroughly rehearsed.

Jarrell's ambition for poetry began early. Tate first met him when the younger poet was a freshman at...