Volume 49, Number 20 · December 19, 2002

Two Poems by Randall Jarrell

By Randall Jarrell, Introduction by Stephen Burt

These two previously unpublished poems by Randall Jarrell (1914– 1965) can be found at the major repository of Jarrell's papers, the Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library. 'When, lit as in a painting of Latour's...' exists there only in typescript, untitled, in a folder of poems considered for inclusion in the set of unpublished poems which concludes Jarrell's posthumous Complete Poems.[*] Its concern with the visual arts and its loose, expansive line mark it as probably a very late poem, composed between 1963 and 1965, and linked closely to 'Man in Majesty' (published in the Complete Poems). The French painter Georges de la Tour, or Latour (1593–1652), also comes up in Jarrell's 1963 poem 'The Old and the New Masters' and in his earlier essay 'Against Abstract Expressionism' (sometimes given its original title, 'The Age of the Chimpanzee').



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