Randall Jarrell - (1914-1965)
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Fuquay-Varina High in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina
Read another essay on Randall Jarrell written by California student
David Villegas.I. Upbringing, Education, Family and Professional Life
"I feel just like an angel!"
Most of the time we picture a writer as someone who is proper and is never caught doing something stupid. John Crowe Ransom, Jarrell's mentor and long-time friend, remembered an occasion that occurred late in the year 1939. Jarrell was flying down the Gambier hillsides on skies with his arms out flung, screaming, "I feel just like an angel!"--an antic that was frowned upon by the Episcopal administration at Kenyon College. Just because someone can compose their emotions into a well-planned poem does not mean that they are composed and in control of their emotions all the time. There is pleasure in chaos and Jarrell allowed himself to enjoy it.
Randall Jarrell was the first one of two born to Owen and Anna Jarrell in 1914. He was not the first child born but he was the oldest one living. Randall had an older sister who dies as an infant. This traumatic event was reflected in may of his works. An example of this "theme of a lost sibling" is "Orestes at Tauris."
Jarrell grew up in rural Shelbyville, Tennessee and, from 1915 to 1925, lived in Long Beach, California. In 1925 Anna Campbell Jarrell took her sons back to Nashville after separating from their father. During the summer and fall of 1926 Randall stayed with his paternal grandparents in Hollywood frequently visiting his Aunt Bettie, who owned the MGM lion. However after that fall, he never wrote or saw them again.
Howell Campbell, his maternal uncle, decided to send him to Vanderbilt University when he returned to Nashville. He received his MA in psychology in 1939. In 1937 Jarrell followed Ransom to Kenyon College. Two more students, Robert Lowell and Peter Taylor, transferred to Kenyon to study under Ransom and roomed with him, along with Jarrell, in his house for their first year there. These two students stayed Jarrell's closest friends throughout his life.
While Jarrell was at Vanderbilt, he became involved with a medical student who was several years older. Her name was Amy Breyer. She felt so inadequate to Jarrell's emotional and intellectual superiority that she broke off the relationship. This heartbreak gave him the emotional drive behind six poems, especially one, "The Christmas Roses."
In 1939 he started a teaching career at the University of Texas at Austin. While there he met his first wife, Mackie Langham. The first of June 1940 was the day of their wedding. That same year his first collection of twenty poems "The Rage for the Lost Penny" was published in Five Young American Poets.
Blood for a Stranger was his first independent volume published in 1942. It has his first twenty poems and twenty-four more. Also, early in that year, he enlisted in the US Army Air Force and was assigned to Sheppard Field in Wichita Falls, Texas. He became a "washed-out" pilot, and was assigned as flight instructor at Chanute Field, in Rantoul, Illinois. Jarrell wrote many letters to his wife during the training period, letters that he later converted into six poems. One of these was titled, "Mail Call." Along with those poems, he wrote a "second 'library' poem." He became a flight navigator late in 1943 and remained until his discharge. He taught at Davis-Monthan Field near Tucson, Arizona and finally reunited with his wife, who began working for the Red Cross. He wrote the rest of the poems that appeared in Little Friend, Little Friend that was published in 1945.
From 1946 to 1947 he took a part-time teaching job at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. This position influenced his first and only fiction Pictures from an Institution in 1954. In the fall of 1947, Jarrell, who was greatly influenced by Peter Taylor, became an associate professor at the Women's College and later taught at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Losses was published in 1948 and contained two-thirds of the poems whose themes were about the war and its aftermath. They seemed to have emerged from his interest in theology. In the summer of 1948 after accepted a position in the Slazburg Seminar in American Civilization, he became infatuated with Germanic Romantic civilization. That was not the only infatuation that Jarrell had that summer. He met an Austrian woman, named Elisabeth Eisler. Five poems spurred from this romance.
That summer of 1951 brought about his meeting with a young novelist named Mary von Schrader at the University of Colorado School for Writers. During this time, he was formally separated from Mackie and their divorce was finalized October 13, 1952. Mary proofread The Seven-Leagues Crutches, his last book of poetry, and they later married on the 8th of November 1952.
The hot summer of 1952 was full of convivial sessions and swims in a nearby quarry with Robert Fitzgerald and Leslie Fielder. Jarrell formed a long-lasting friendship with Fitzgerald. During that time, he was a teaching fellow at the Indiana School of Letters. He next taught at the University of Illinois for the spring semester of 1953. By this time he had two daughters by Mary, Beatrice and Allayne, who came to Greeensboro that fall. The following summer was the publication of his first book of criticism, Poetry and the Age. Jarrell started his two-year appointment in the Library of Congress as a Poetry Consultant in the fall of 1956.
Mary took him on a summer trip to Italy in 1958. This trip gave him the inspiration to write several poems on works of art. One of his more popular was "The Bronze David of Donatello." Upon his return to Greensboro in 1958, he kept extremely busy with "poetry readings, appearances at literary festivals, and academic assignments." Jarrell was also a guest professor at the University of Cincinnati for six weeks and then was made full-time professor at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. He had a burst of creative energy in 1959 that supplied part one of the translation of the German poem Faust. Only fragments of part two were completed upon his death.
He and his family finally moved into their home in a wooded area on the edge of Greensboro near Guilford College. It was built to their specifications and completed in the summer of 1959. The family then traveled to Montecito, California and while there Jarrell completed "In Montecito."
Several extremely significant things happened in 1962: first, he contracted hepatitis; second, he began writing juvenile literature; third, his mother returned in his life. The hepatitis led to intestinal and neuralgic disorders. While he was in the hospital, Michael di Capua encouraged Jarrell to write juvenile literature. He produced several translations of Grimms Brothers' Fairy Tales in a series that included translations and introductions of other well-know writers. His first children's book, The Gingerbread Rabbit and The Bat-Poet were completed that same year but not published until 1964. Along with his new field of readers, his mother returned in l962, bringing with her all the letters he wrote her while he was in Hollywood. This caused a floodgate of memories to open, creating another burst of creativity. This period produced many of the poems found in The Lost World and Fly by Night . Oddly enough, the poem "The Lost Children" was based on a dream Mary Jarrell had about her grown daughter and a girl who died.
Jarrell was depressed from spring to early summer of 1969. He began seeing a psychiatrist whom he met in Cincinnati. This doctor increased his dosage of Elavil, a mood-elevating drug. He went to a gastroenterologist who gave him a new diet, that caused him to be elated and hyperactive. He lost sleep, felt inspired and wrote many poems and fragments. His last finished poem was "The Player Piano." In February of 1965 he was diagnosed with manic-depression. earlier self-inflicted wounds acted up and caused pain and impaired his mobility. Four month later in October, he went back to the hospital. On October 14, 1965, a few evenings after his return to the hospital, he was struck by a car, just a mile from the hospital, as he walked along US highway 15-501. Some think that it was a suicide but there is not enough evidence to prove that it was. It is presently filed as an accident and the driver was not charged with anything. There was a memorial service held at Yale in 1966. all the memoirs and tributes read at the service were collected in Randall Jarrell, 1914-1965.
Mary Jarrell, Randall's literary executor and Michael diCapua, his editor, consolidated all the poems from his other volumes, along with drafts fragments, and earlier uncollected poems into The Complete Poems that was published in 1969. Another volume of criticism was put together, containing uncollected reviews, introductions, and some essays which make up Kiplin, Auden, & Co., published in 1980. Mary took 400 out of the 2500 letters that Randall wrote her and other people and collected them into Randall Jarrell's Letters, published in 1985.
If we learn anything from Jarrell, it should be to take time out of our busy lives to "..feel just like an angel!" and do something we truly enjoy.
II. Literary Works
Blood of a Stranger
:
This collection contained all twenty poems from his first publication "The Rage for the Lost Penny," and about twenty-four more poems. None of these poems have themes of
war because most of them were written before World War II. These poems' themes range from the "deteriorating international situation" to the speaker urging us to 'change" our
lives before it is too late. They are either written directly speaking to the reader, or in a dramatic poem, or quasi-narrative, that tells a story and whose protagonist is most of the
time a child realizing something new or an adult looking back on their childhood. It also contained the first of several "library" poems, that emphasizes the power of literature.
Pictures from an Institution:
It is the first and last fictional novel, or as he liked to call it "comedy," that Randall ever
wrote. This novel is a collection of "portraits" interwoven with a "musical" dialect. The pictures depict the "academic personality" as being "satirized." This method represents
his disgust and love "for such 'education' " after the war. The novel also shows his "zest for life" and sometimes "superior, even ingenuously cruel, disdain for the shoddy or
mediocre", although he judged his characters with both "sympathy and severity."
Poetry and the Age:
This is a collection of periodical criticism and contains two essays "On the Obscurity of
Modern Poetry" and "On the Cover-Cultivation of Criticism in Contemporary Writing." These essays bind the pieces together to create a book. In all of Jarrell's criticism, he plays
both sides of the opinion. He uses the view that he is criticizing in his criticism. In his essay "On the Obscurity of Modern Poetry", he ponders why writes at all. He reads
statistics that say 48% of people do not read any books during a whole year's time. This fact makes him sad because it separates him from a large part of society. He is lonely and
does not want to be cut off from society by his love for literature. Jarrell shows this endless struggle in both his criticism and his essays.
III. Literary Works
The Rage for the Lost Penny (1940)
Blood for a Stranger (1942)
Little Friend, Little Friend (1945)
Losses (1948)
The Seven-League Crutches (1951)
Poetry and the Age (1953)
Pictures from an Institution (1954)
Selected Poems (1955, 1964)
The Anchor Book of Stories (1958)
The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960) National Book Award (1961)
Jerome (1960)
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1962)
The Gingerbread Rabbit (1964)
The Bat-Poet (1964)
The Animal Family (1965)
The Lost World (1965)
The Complete Poems (1969)
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
Fly by Night (1976)
Kipling, Auden & Co. (1980)
Randall Jarrell's Letters (1985)
IV. Sources
Quinn, Sister Bernetta. Randall Jarrell. Boston: Twayne Publishers,1981.
Modern American Poetry. 15 May 2000
DISCovering Authors. 18 May 2000
http://galenet.gale.com/
Poets' Corner. 18 May 2000
http://www.geocities.com/
"Light on the Poet's Waste Land." The New York Times on the Web. 16 August 1953. 29 May 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/08/01/specials/jarrell-age.html
"Randall Jarrell, Child and Mother Frightened and Consoling." The New York Times on the Web. 2 February 1969. 29 May 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/08/01/specials/jarrell-complete.html
The Academy of American Poets. 28 May 2000
http://www.poets.org/
"Poetry Rates Hi with Expert's Fi: LP's Will Boom in Library Room."
The New York Times on the Web. 6 September 1951. 28 May 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/08/01/specials/jarrell-hifi.html
"3 Receive National Book Awards for 1960."
The New York Times on the Web. 15
March 1961. 28 May 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/08/01/specials/jarrell-award.html
The University of North Carolina, Greensboro. 28 May 2000
http://www.uncg.edu/
"The New Books of Poetry." The New York Times on the Web. 1 November 1942.
29 May 2000
http://www.poets.org/LIT/poet/rjarrell.htm
This essay was submitted by a student of Rita Achenbach, a teacher at Fuquay-Varina High School in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina.