Volume 32, Number 8 · May 9, 1985
Poet in the Sun Belt
By Christopher Benfey
Randall Jarrell's Letters: An Autobiographical and Literary Selection
edited by Mary Jarrell
Houghton Mifflin, 473 pp., $29.95
Randall Jarrell thought of the poet as 'a sort of accident-prone worker to whom poems happen.' Jarrell wrote reviews, children's books, translations, and a comic novel; but his letters make clear that he lived for the accidents. In times of safety, when no poems came, he was despondent. When he was young the poems happened in abundance. He published four books of poems in nine years, from 1942 (when he was twenty-eight) to 1951, but he had to wait nine more years before he had to wait nine more years before he had enough poems for his next book, The Woman at the Washington Zoo, of which more than a third consists of translations of German poems. His last collection, The Lost World, was published a few months before his death in 1965. That was twenty years ago, and Jarrell's life and death are still shrouded in mystery, while his reputation as a poet is uncertain.
Review, 4204 words
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