“... who were truly great” should ever have been greeted with anything but helpless embarrassment,’ Randall Jarrell wrote, ‘makes me ashamed of the planet upon which I dwell,’ and you see why the line disgusted a generation that valued irony and understatement. Robert Lowell told Spender that the line should be ‘I would think continually of those who ...”

“... the manuscript ‘The Golden Age: 1945-1950’. Peter chuckles at the title, recalling something Randall Jarrell had written: ‘how, in the most glorious of golden ages, there would always be someone complaining about how yellow everything looked’. In the coda, Peter and his creator return to this question (they have been brought together to tape a ...”

“... much. All the while, host Bill Styron looking a bit subdued as usual these days; we talked about Randall Jarrell’s possible suicide, Bill’s own depression. And I talked to him about William James’s own breakdown and his resuscitation through faith. What in hell am I doing with all these theatre types? Alfred Kazin’s journals, 26 December 1986 ...”

“... notes, whether the divergences are slips or hard-won new readings. Every edition is, to adapt what Randall Jarrell once said of the novel, a work of some length which has something wrong with it, but you do want to know what Thomas wrote. He was not a good proofreader himself. One of his oversights enjoys a mild celebrity: ‘Once in this wine the summer ...”

“... essays, lectures and reviews are often brilliant, their deus ex machina quality cuts both ways; as Randall Jarrell noted, readers of his prose are continually exclaiming ‘Now I see!’ and also ‘You’ve traded your soul to the devil for nineteen million generalisations.’ God as well as the devil probably has something to do with it. After his ...”

“... him back to the mundane world in which cliché is cliché and overstatement is overstatement. Randall Jarrell once said that Graves was divided between ‘the logic-chopping regimental explainer’ and the poet who is ‘Baby, Lover, Victim howling in dreadful longing for the Mother, who bears, possesses and destroys’. Graves needed the ...”

“... heritage and combine it with what he has learned as a working artist. If you can imagine a Randall Jarrell less worried about the place of the superior mind in a democracy, you will gather something of Montale’s capacity to talk about art in general without being carried away by general ideas. He had an unerring ear for the dogmatic no matter ...”

“... and experience, indifference and exposure, in relation to the planet’s events, ideas and people. Randall Jarrell – valued by Lowell for his ability to see the man in the poem – spoke early on of Lowell’s lack of interest in people, and we need not think that the good poems about his parents, wives and children, and about historical ...”

“... and often deranged racial supremacist came from the more perceptive critics of a former colony: Randall Jarrell and Edmund Wilson, the title of whose essay, ‘The Kipling Nobody Reads’, tells its own story. Perhaps his ghost has done penance enough; time seems to have pardoned him for writing well and to have forgiven him his views. Ricketts’s ...”

“... poetry by T.S. Eliot (‘East Coker’ and ‘The Dry Salvages’), W.H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Randall Jarrell, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop; fiction by Kafka (‘In the Penal Colony’), Jean Stafford and Saul Bellow; criticism by Wilson, Rahv, Trilling, Phillips, Kazin and McCarthy. As the group acknowledged, far from ...”

“... Constance could see that, in some real sense, the Rosenbaums’ lives were over,’ the poet Randall Jarrell – a close friend and frequent Englisher – wrote in his novel Pictures from an Institution (1954), in which Constance is taken to be an authorial stand-in, with Gottfried and Irene Rosenbaum as Blücher and Arendt. ‘His automatic ...”

“... another for almost thirty years, Lowell wrote to her: ‘I see us still when we first met, both at Randall [Jarrell]’s and then for a couple of years later. I see you as rather tall, long brown-haired and thirty I guess and I don’t know what.’ Bishop replied, once more seeking accuracy from him and a sharper sense of ...”