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“... verse of Sidney Keyes. In America, Wilson seems in later years to have sensed that the youthful Randall Jarrell might emulate his discernment of the Twenties about a new generation of writers. In 1940 he gave Jarrell a run as poetry reviewer in the New Republic, and suggested to the New Yorker that they should ...”

“... brought home in the prolonged minutiae of Marianne Moore’s criticism, and in the small talk of Randall Jarrell’s correspondence. Both have great collective charm, giving the effect of looking through the glass into a well-matured aquarium. ‘American literary culture’ seems far-off, sweetly homogeneous, infinitely attractive, whether mirrored in ...”

“... Born in 1914, Randall Jarrell belonged to the first generation of American poets who found a ready home in the country’s burgeoning university system. Of the great modernists of the previous era, only Robert Frost assumed the role of pedagogue to undergraduates, taking his first job at Amherst College in 1917 ...”

“... to her influence and gentle longevity – she is the most powerful poetry critic in America since Randall Jarrell. She started reviewing in 1966, a year after Jarrell’s death, when the Massachusetts Review asked her to write a journal of the year’s work in poetry. Like ...”

“... to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great. Randall Jarrell Often they are naked; clothing is scattered across a field; or trousers and shirt appear in some nearby village – a little tattered, waiting to be folded. Sometimes with women the chemise is scorched, yet – strange – the dress and ...”

“... Was it Randall Jarrell who defined a novel as a long piece of prose fiction with something wrong with it? By that yardstick, Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard is a novel thousands of times over. Timothy Mo has decided to go solo with this book, and has set up his own press for the purpose. This is not vanity publishing as that phrase is normally understood (Mo has in the past made money for himself and his publishers) but vanity certainly seems to come into it ...”

“... In April 1965, Randall Jarrell’s just published book of verse, The Lost World, was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review by Joseph Bennett. Bennett quite liked four of the poems but the rest of them, he said, were ‘taken up with Jarrell’s familiar, clanging vulgarity, corny clichés, cutenesses, and the intolerable self-indulgence of his tear-jerking bourgeois sentimentality ...”

“... of Villon. Verlaine noticed this affinity, and Pound, who had read Verlaine, passed it on. Randall Jarrell returned to the comparison in a brief essay on Corbière, published in Poetry and the Age, where he praised the ‘cruel and magical tenderness’ of the verse. The figure who emerges at the end of the poem to embody these feelings is an ...”

“... job: if Brightman is a woman in some sense after her subject’s own heart it’s not in the way Randall Jarrell was thinking of when he put Mary McCarthy in Pictures from an Institution, saying that people couldn’t mention her style ‘without using the vocabulary of a salesman of kitchen knives’. On the contrary, Brightman is not murderous at ...”

“... to write The Bridge as if he had the sensibility typical of Whitman.’ Dylan Thomas’s poems, Randall Jarrell wrote in 1940, ‘often mean much less than Crane’s – but when you consider Crane’s meanings this is not altogether a disadvantage’. And whether he was thought to be confused and self-deceiving, or vacuous, or even crazy, Crane was ...”

“... yell.(Imagine breaking a line about carnage on ‘kind of’.) After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Randall Jarrell wrote that he wished he could become ‘a naturalised dog or cat’ – anything to get away from human beings. Something of the same exasperation animates Shapero’s attitude towards 21st-century public life:Wars are like children –you ...”

“... less common. Why, though, has it been so difficult for people just to see that she’s great? Randall Jarrell did, clearly enough, when in a 1956 review of the Poems he wrote: ‘Occasionally you meet someone and feel in astonished joy: “Well, this is what people ought to be like”; this is what poems ought to be like.’ For ...”

“... of stress on the ‘I must’. The greatest difficulty for the poet is how to go on being one. Randall Jarrell set it out like this at the end of his essay on Stevens: ‘A man who is a good poet at 40 may turn out to be a good poet at 60; but he is more likely to have stopped writing poems, to be doing exercises in his own manner, or to have reverted ...”

“... long gone, as all good composers of memoirs should. He makes himself amusing for our benefit, as Randall Jarrell, in a somewhat different spirit, made Mary McCarthy amusing for us as Gertrude Johnson, in Pictures from an Institution. Maybe not an accurate portrait, or intended to be (indeed Jarrell might have ...”

“... poet’s by some two years. Of at least equal importance are the poets of his own generation: Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop. There are more letters to Bishop than to anybody else. For thirty years Lowell and Bishop admired and influenced one another’s poetry and took unusual trouble over their ...”