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“... New Criticism, John Crowe Ransom, I.A. Richards, Allen Tate, and young up-and-coming members like Randall Jarrell, a world in which the academic and the poet were entering together a new world of feeling and technique, joining tradition and novelty. Bliss was it in that dawn when American campuses beckoned hospitably and offered glittering prizes. From ...”

“... of the Leavis collective, though never needing its authoritarian pose. Good critics – Leavis and Randall Jarrell, Updike, Furbank, A.S. Byatt, Pritchett himself – are more alike than not. In contrast to high-tech men, they share with the authors and novelists who are their subjects a readiness to enter into the diversity and viscosity of the written ...”

“... encountering something one would not be at all pleased to hear said about oneself. The character Randall Jarrell based on Mary McCarthy, in his novel Pictures from an Institution, is described as having ‘a bark worse than her bite. But what am I saying? Gertrude’s bark was her bite – and many a bite has stayed awake at night, wishing it was ...”

“... These boasts defy the many Greek myths that punish artists for ambition (Marsyas, Arachne etc). Randall Jarrell said a poet is a man who spends a lifetime standing out in thunderstorms waiting to be struck by lightning; that was a metaphor for inspiration, though a literal interpretation also suggests itself. Even Pindar, Horace and Ovid threw down the ...”

“... There were exceptions. Joseph Warren Beach thought Auden’s textual shenanigans were treachery, Randall Jarrell thought Auden’s wit and elegance quite enjoyable up to a point – or rather, up to the point of their becoming needlepoint – but after that a pretty dispiriting spectacle. Reviewing The Shield of Achilles, he said that ‘Auden is using ...”

“... marriage and of the extraordinary circle of friends, including Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell and Saul Bellow, that Berryman gathered at this period. Berryman’s life can be summarised, albeit crudely, as follows: he was born in 1914, the son of John Allyn Smith, who died in 1926, apparently by suicide; his mother then married the ...”

“... Frost’s ‘greatest poem’? Meyers’s observations are tediously un-new (drawing as they do on Randall Jarrell and Lionel Trilling); but he adds one triumphant new wrinkle: ‘In “Design” the normally black spider and blue heal-all ... are both wickedly white – a play on Elinor’s maiden name.’ Well, well; so Elinor is the witch who assembled ...”

“... and the unassuming aspects of Frost animates – and sometimes enervates – the poems. Randall Jarrell once referred to his ‘cast-iron whimsy’, and noted that ‘we begin to read Frost, always, with the taste of “Birches” in our mouth – a taste a little brassy, a little sugary.’ The taste might have something to do with the ...”

“... published by Random House, is laboriously indebted to Lowell, though the poems often resemble what Randall Jarrell described as the ‘academic and clumsy’ lines of ‘The Mills of the Kavanaughs’ rather than the febrile inventiveness of Life Studies or History. The best of the work is competent and even beautiful, but in light of the corpse paint to ...”

“... any work of literature; it can only hinder or chivvy the institutional success of a work of art. Randall Jarrell used to say that the critic’s duty was to be ‘right’; he liked rhetorically to wonder how many of us would have recognised Moby-Dick’s greatness in 1851. But there is no evidence that the weather of reviewing affects the climate of ...”

“... sat waiting sentence in the bull pen beside a Negro boy with curlicues of marijuana in his hair. Randall Jarrell’s five-line poem ‘The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner’ must be one of the best-known American poems about the war: From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from ...”

“... double role, while Graves felt that no homosexual man could hope to be authentically inspired. As Randall Jarrell first pointed out in an excellent essay of 1955 (collected in The Third Book of Criticism), the psychic configurations mapped by Graves’s dotty belief-system are not particularly unusual, indeed can be shown to make perfectly clear ...”

“... by becoming old age pensioners. The upturn in Stead’s literary fortunes began in America when Randall Jarrell discovered The Man Who Loved Children. It was reissued in 1965, 25 years after its first appearance, with his introduction describing it as a book like Moby Dick – a masterpiece which at the time of publication ‘nobody praised and nobody ...”

“... seemed, was ceded pride of place, the ‘most important American poet now at work’. Lowell and Randall Jarrell, roommates at Kenyon College in the 1930s, and to a lesser extent Berryman too, were big on rating and ranking: the top three poets, the top three oyster houses or second-basemen, the three best Ibsen plays – they seemed especially to like ...”

“... times in the last thirty years, the era of the ‘post-modern’, most famously in a 1955 essay by Randall Jarrell called ‘The Age of Criticism’. Jarrell noticed that the typical literary quarterly in the Fifties had ‘two and a half pages of poems, 11 of a story and 134 of criticism’. He also traced the three ...”