Randall Jarrell - Introduction & Biography

                Randall Jarrell was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1914.  He was a United States author, writer, critic, and poet.  Jarrell attend Vanderbilt University and graduated with a Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree.  While attending Vanderbilt, he was closely acquainted with the groups of poets which made up the Fugitives group.  His work is not considered to have been greatly influenced by them.  He taught at Kenyon College from 1937 to 1939, where he met John Crowe Ransom and Robert Lowell.  He enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1942, the same year in which his first book of poems, Blood for a Stranger, was published.  He then left the Air Corps and joined the Army where he worked as a control tower operator.  This experience provided much material for his poetry.  His reputation as a poet was established in 1945, while he was still serving in the army.  His second book, ‘Little Friend, Little Friend,’ bitterly and vividly documents  the intense fears and moral struggles of young soldiers.  His other volumes that followed were all characterized by great technical skill, empathy with the lives of others, and an almost painful sensitivity.  After the war, he accepted a teaching position at the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina in Greensboro.  Jarrell is also highly regarded as a superior literary author and was considered the most clever and most feared poetry critic of his generation.  Jarrell’s reputation as a poet was not fully established until 1960.  He died at the age of 51 in 1965.  He was struck by a car and killed while walking along a road in Chapel Hill near sunset.  The coroner ruled the death accidental but Jarrell had been treated for mental illness recently.  He had a previous suicide attempt, leaving the truth of the matter in doubt.   In 2004, the Metropolitan Nashville Historical Commission approved placement of a historical marker in his honor, to be placed at Hume-Fogg High School, which he attended.                                       

"Randall Jarrell - Poems and Biography by AmericanPoems.com." American Poems - YOUR Poetry Site. Web. 09 Apr. 2011.

"Randall Jarrell." Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More. Web. 09 Apr. 2011.