SOURCE: Longenbach, James. “Randall Jarrell's Semifeminine Mind.” Southwest Review 81, no. 3 (summer 1996): 368-86.

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

As a boy, Randall Jarrell posed for the statue of Ganymede, loved by Zeus, adorning the replica of the Parthenon in Nashville's Centennial Park. Jarrell's adult friends were bemused by this anecdote, for it seemed almost too appropriate to their idea of Jarrell's sensibility: over and over again their memoirs return, more or less uncomfortably, to Jarrell's lack of manly virtues. Berryman remembered that Jarrell once had a hangover brought on by a poisoned canapé: “He's the only poet that I've ever known in the universe who simply did not drink.” Robert Watson (Jarrell's colleague at Greensboro) remembered that, in addition, Jarrell did not smoke, use profanity, or enjoy jokes about sex. To Robert Lowell, consequently, Jarrell never quite seemed one of the boys: “one...