Biography

Randall Jarrell was born to Owen and Anna Jarrell in Nashville on May 6, 1914, to the shifting landscapes of modernism and looming war. Jarrell, whose name is accented on the second syllable, had a difficult childhood marked by the separation of his parents and by being moved around from place to place; the desire for true “home” is a topic for much of his poetry. Attending college at Vanderbilt University, he was drawn into literature by his association with John Crowe Ransom, who, with his friends Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate, was active during the 1920’s and 1930’s in reinvigorating Southern poetry. Ransom was amajor influence on Jarrell’s poetry, as was Robert Lowell, with whom he would share a lifelong friendship.

Jarrell took both bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Vanderbilt University in 1935 and 1938 and then went to teach at Kenyon College, following his mentor Ransom. Jarrell taught at Kenyon from 1937 to 1939. He left Kenyon for the University of Texas at Austin (then University of Texas Main University), where he roomed at first with Robert Lowell. In 1939, he married Mackie Langham. He taught at the University of Texas until 1942, published his first book, Blood for a Stranger, in that year, and then went to war. Though he never fought in battle, having been rejected as a potential pilot, he trained Air Force pilots and worked with them in the “celestial navigation tower.” This position gave him plenty of knowledge and war experience to lend authority to his poetry and reinforced his sense that the commonality of human experience was a sense of loss.

After the war he taught again, now at Sarah Lawrence College, and became literary editor of The Nation. In 1947, he took a post at the Women’s College, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where his wife was also on the staff. However, his marriage failed. He divorced Mackie in 1952 and also that year married Mary Eloise von Schrader. In the next few years, he traveled widely and took visiting posts as his work became more and more well known and received numerous honors and awards. In 1958, he accepted a position as professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where he was to remain more or less for the rest of his teaching career.

As editor of The Nation, he was known for his caustic columns—he inspired fear as well as respect among the literati. His tendency to rip authors to shreds was well known; his statements on poetics were direct and peremptory. His poems held an element of elegy and nostalgia; his essays were hard-hitting and incisive.

His poem “The Marchen” suggested to editor Michael di Capua in 1962 that Jarrell would be a good translator of fairy tales. He was indeed a success as a translator and also began to write for children; his career as a children’s writer was brief but notable: His first two children’s books, The Gingerbread Rabbit and The Bat-Poet, appeared to good reviews in 1964, the year before his death. His lifelong preoccupation with how children see and experience the world helped him to produce poems and stories that used the child’s-eye vision imaginatively in order to create a mythic world of talking animals and birds.

However, the poet’s last few years, despite his public success, were marred by illness and depression. A feeling of generalized illness resulted in a diagnosis of hepatitis in 1962, and he was never fully well again. He was hospitalized for both physical illness and for a nervous breakdown, and bouts of optimism about his work were interspersed with depths of discouragement. He died after being hit by a car on a lonely road on October 14, 1965. Because of the odd circumstances of the death—including the driver’s claim that Jarrell walked in front of the car—some thought it was suicide. However, the incident was judged by the authorities to have been an accident. His major book of poems The Lost World was published later that year.

Analysis

One of Jarrell’s books is titled Losses (1948), and that single word could be his statement of theme. The losses are of loved ones, innocence, consolation, belief, and hope. He writes of young men lost to the war and other lives lost literally and figuratively.

His poems express a deep sense of the inner void that comes frombeing able to rely on nothing, to keep nothing. His poems explore the various ways one can try to fill the inside emptiness, almost always unsuccessfully. His war poems were controversial when they first appeared, though later they were highly valued. In the poems of his 1945 collection Little Friend, Little Friend, Jarrell stresses the ironic contrast between the tough, hard war machines of the state and the vulnerable young men who are forced to serve them. Thus, the villain was not the Germans or the Japanese but the war situation itself—a message not universally appreciated during and right after the war.

Jarrell had a lonely childhood in which his only reliable companions seemed to be books; this sense of isolation and the contrast between fictional and real worlds dominates his poetry. Even his earliest work is haunted by books. Throughout his poems, libraries, books, fictional heroes, and the act of reading figure prominently. The wounded, baffled speaker may seek validation in books, but always the books let him down by seeming to make promises that the world will not keep. This is part of the message of “90 North.”

Jarrell often centers the poem on a woman’s consciousness, whether she is the speaker or whether the poem is in the third person. The women he creates are not blinded by a desire for progress or conquest or by the need to participate in the causes of men. Rather they see their helplessness and powerlessness over the forces that control them and those they love. Thus, the women’s voices or perceptions speak of the futility of all human goals or endeavors, especially those related to war. (One of his major women figures of the poems does not seem to feel this hopelessness, and that is the nameless subject of “Girl in a Library”; but it is her ignorance-innocence that prevents her from seeing the futility of her plans and projects, and her innocent optimism is given the lie by the sad wisdom of the fictional woman who looks down at her.)

Jarrell’s use of form is unusual because the style of his poems is so casual, so colloquial, that the fact that they are often in traditional forms often passes without notice. He uses patterns and forms subtly and without insistence, and the flow of reverie is often gently controlled by an underlying metrics. He often uses a flexible blank verse that allows for modulations and sometimes uses rhyme without regular rhythm. The normal patterns of speech hang gently on their formal frames to produce an effect of effortlessness. He uses the combination of plain speech and formal pattern favored by Robert Frost and by his favorite British contemporary poet, Philip Larkin. This style sets him apart from the intellectually and verbally dense Modernists such as T. S. Eliot. However, Jarrell’s forms are more flexible than those of Frost or Larkin.

His poems all seem to speak, whether they are in first person or not. This is their charm—the voice, the consistent, easily recognizable voice that recounts irreparable losses in a tone of bemusement that this is how the world could be. His perspective is one of mild surprise, a pained realization that the world is full of horror and injustice, when childhood vision and the books that shaped it promised otherwise. Often his poems rise to an exquisite climax of longing and loss, a point at which the speaker knows that what he desires to have back is something he never had and never could have had. This is especially true in the poems of his last book, The Lost World, which appeared posthumously; the title poem is a stunning elegy to everything that passes, perhaps to himself as well.

“90 North” is a poem of pained disillusion, one of Jarrell’s early poems which makes vividly real the distance between the imagined world and the real one. The poem has two settings, the past, in which the child dreamed of discovering the North Pole, his dreams perhaps based on reading of Admiral Richard Byrd and his adventures. However, as an adult, he realizes that the child’s dreams of conquest were meaningless. He revisits his child self arriving there at the imagined summit, surrounded by his dogs and the corpses of his frozen companions.

Sheltered from the ice by his furs, he can only ask, “And now what? Why, go back.” His steps now must always be “to the south,” toward bitter awareness of the emptiness of his life. Only in the “Cloud-Cuckoo-Land” of dreams could he make a meaningful discovery; where he is in reality there is only darkness, ignorance, and pain. The last four lines have the word “darkness” repeated four times, and what comes from the darkness, according to the poem, is not enlightenment but pain. “And we call it wisdom. It is pain.” All dreams fail; all effort comes to nothing. This is one of the starkest of Jarrell’s disillusionment poems, in which the reality of pain and darkness is contrasted not with what might have been but what he once dreamed might be.

One of Jarrell’s war poems that slants the issue through the eyes of a woman, this poem tells the story of a woman come to visit her son one afternoon at a bomber training field. She sees the landscape, the hangars, and the men working on the planes as an alien world.

Jarrell comments that the woman

The woman feels the night coming on and she fears for the young soldiers, innocent and purposeful, so vulnerable next to the arms and equipment they have to trust. She is not able to buy into their purpose—but they are not able to look beyond it. “For them the bombers answer everything.” The poem hovers near iambic pentameter, occasionally drawing in from it or opening out from it. The bleakness of the landscape and the presence of the death-machines are weighed against the love of the mother for her son and her fears for him.

This short poem is perhaps Jarrell’s most frequently anthologized work; its shocking violence and condensed brevity give it an immediate and lasting impact. The title is the subject of the poem, told from the point of view of the dead gunner. Jarrell has provided a note to the poem which explains the ball turret gunner’s tiny womblike enclosure in the plane and the kind of hose that would be turned on the plane to clean it; he has also commented on the “wet fur” as representing the inside of the gunner’s jacket. The poem uses an image which is suggestive of abortion to comment on the waste of war. The young gunner, who comments, “From my mother’s sleep I fell into the state,” never awoke to life. Rather, he “hunched in the belly” of the plane, this new, state-provided death womb, until he woke only to die, amidst the “black flak and the nightmare fighters.” His body was washed “out of the turret with a hose.” Thus the sleep of childhood led directly to the sleep of death, and only with waking his realization of the imminence of that death. The image of the baby animal suggested by the wet fur, in the mechanical body of the death machine, is hard for the reader to escape. The five lines of irregularly rhymed verse close on an image of annihilation. It is the last poem of this collection, and in a sense serves as a commentary for it.

“The Märchen” is one of Jarrell’s longest and most difficult poems, which merges the stories of the Brothers Grimm to produce a complicated meditation on the relations between a person’s stories, one’s grand narratives, and a person’s life. The forest in which all the events happen is both reality and the stories people create. The main character is Hansel, but he is also identified with Christ. He does not follow a variation of Hansel’s actions alone but also follows the stories of other characters in the Grimm stories. Thus, the title, “The Märchen,” suggests the fairy tales or folktales, all taken together. The narrative is a melange of many fairy tales and other stories as well, including the Christian story. Difficulty with the narrative itself may be one of the reason that few critics have discussed this poem, and those who do come up with differing interpretations.

The forest is filled with actions and wishes, odd crossings of fairy tale characters, superstitions, and beliefs. Hansel is a suffering hero whose destiny seems to be to suffer for others. He is a part of all the stories about heroes who are invented to overcome all the evils of the world, represented as witches, wicked stepparents, darkness, death—all the dark threats which cannot really be overcome in life. Motives and reasons are lost in the forest, and the narrative shifts from dream to action, from reality to imagination, abruptly and without transition.

All the archetypal heroes of the folktales merge and mesh. The only way to escape from the predestined doomed endings is to change—a difficult, if not impossible, task. At the end the speaker asks, “Have we not learned/ Neither of beasts nor kingdoms nor their Lord . . . /Neither to rule nor die? To change, to change!”

This poem reveals attitudes that conflict in its narrative of a female student who is following a course of study that the poet obviously does not believe in—it is both tender and condescending about its subject. The girl, half asleep in a library where the books are mostly beyond her comprehension, is represented as more body than mind, less than a scholar as she pursues her education—a degree in home economics and physical education. She is far from the ideal student; her language is plebian and her goals are simplistic. She lacks both the wisdom and the experience to understand the life she is living. She is mocked by Tatyana Larina, the woman from Alexander Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin (1825-1832, 1833; Eugene Onegin, 1881), one of Jarrell’s favorite books. The speaker engages in a conversation with Tatyana about the student, considering the differences between the subtle and wise Tatyana and the real girl.

It is the student’s healthy physical being that leads to the double vision of the poet, which is composed of affection and disdain: “This is the waist the spirit breaks its wrist on,” comments the disembodied, unidentified speaker. However, in spite of her intellectual limitations, her vitality and her physical verve give her qualities of the mythic. The double vision comes in an implied comparison of the girl and her library setting—she is studying but lacks wisdom; education is lost on her. Yet the poem’s conclusion shows that she has her value as a female archetype, a fertility queen:

This poem uses a female persona to examine from a woman’s point of view the sense of the futility of ordinary life. The middle-aged woman is grocery shopping, thinking about her life as it was as a young woman when she was beautiful and how it is currently, when she is aging and no longer attractive. She cannot quite understand what happened—how she who was “good enough to eat” in her young years now is invisible to the boy who puts her groceries in her car. The poem is narrated in the present tense, and follows the thoughts of the woman through the grocery store passing or picking up products—with ironic names like “Cheer” and “Joy”—and realizing that despite the fact that she has what so many would want—a husband, grown children, wealth—she really has nothing, for only death is awaiting her.

She thinks of the death of her friend, whose funeral she attended the previous day and who had told her she seemed exceptionally young—but she realizes that “really no one is exceptional.” For all she has, she has nothing that can be kept. The poem shows the tragedy of everyday life—not as dramatic as war deaths but with the same outcome. Unlike many of Jarrell’s other poems, there are no literary figures as shadows—only the speaker’s past as she reflects on her commonplace life and her eventual death.

“The Player Piano” is thought by many to be Jarrell’s last poem, written shortly before he was killed by a motorist. Its narrator is a woman who meets another woman and has a brief friendly interchange with her, then goes home to consider the poverty of her own life. In this poem, Jarrell’s despair is more muted than in others, but his sorrow at the disappointments of life is very present.

The persona is a woman, although the speaker’s sex is not immediately apparent. She eats at a pancake house where the owner turns out to be a woman about her age who shares memories of Pasadena—memories not so much of the place but of shared elements in their history. After the speaker leaves to go back to her hotel, she starts thinking about her past and about her memories of childhood, which materialize to her as a scene of her childhood living room with a player piano, to which she listens with her parents. Her childhood was clearly not happy, but she absolves her parents—they were not to blame for her childhood misery, because they “weren’t old enough to know any better.” She thinks of the player piano, parents and the daughter listening, pretending to play the keys that are actually playing themselves, going up and down beyond her touch. This scene is a fine image of a life where the music is already set, the would-be player having no way of changing the tune.

It may be that through the use of this woman persona, Jarrell is forgiving his own parents for the instability of his childhood and attempting to set himself free from it and them. The image of the child desiring to play and the keys going up and down without her touching them is one of the most appealing of Jarrell’s many portrayals of powerlessness.

Summary

Randall Jarrell has constructed a persuasive persona whose meditations on loss and isolation continue to speak to new generations of readers; his poems read all together in The Complete Poems (1969) provide the full impact of his vision. His first-hand observations of World War II give amemorable account in poems of this time period and the atmosphere of the war; many students have had their impression of that war shaped in part by these poems. Jarrell greatly admired war correspondent Ernie Pyle, and his own poetry is like Pyle’s war dispatches in the combination of precision and passion. Moreover, his belief in the sad integrity of the child’s vision remains persuasive. Jarrell merges personal losses with those of others to produce poems that are a telling indictment of war. Their mixture of modernist disillusionment with a thwarted romanticism produce a crescendo of sadness for a lost world—a world that never was and which Jarrell himself realized never existed.

Bibliography

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