Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Pritchard ( Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered ) here seeks to give Jarrell (1914-1965) his due and offers a searching, spry elucidation of the poet-critic's complex character. Born in Tennessee, Jarrell was circulated among an extended family on the demise of his parents' marriage; after an abortive try at secretarial and accounting studies, he found his way to Vanderbilt University in 1932. Under the wing of such poets and critics as John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate, who all taught at Vanderbilt, he published his first poems. He also developed a formidable critical acumen, exercised later in devastatingly intelligent rebuffs and appreciations of poetic peers. Plumbing Jarrell's oddly narcissistic personality (his second wife, Mary, noted that ``to be married to Randall was to be encapsulated with him''), Pritchard, though ``no single-minded admirer of Jarrell's verse,'' convincingly praises poems as ``performances, cunningly staged by an artist who knows how far to go in his rhetorical demands on a listening audience.'' Photos not seen by PW. (Apr.)

Library Journal

Jarrell (1914-65) was, among other things, a poet, literary editor, and preeminent critic. Though he was active for three decades, his name is largely unfamiliar today. Using a lucid and detailed critical style, Pritchard offers a farily advanced level of analysis of this gifted and undervalued writer, particularly of his poetry. He provides no gossipy retellings of incidents, instead demonstrating influences through the usage of vocabulary, cadence, and structure. Recommended for those studying modern American poetry and new criticism, especially at the college level. For a more straightforward biographical approach, Randall Jarrell's Letters (Houghton, 1983) would be more appropriate.-- Janice Braun, Medical Historical Lib., Yale Univ.