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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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a vocation in those days, not a profession. For Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz and Randall Jarrell, disciples of those exemplary teacher-critics John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, criticism was an essential component of a literary career. And for the critics, the obverse was true: Lionel Trilling wrote fiction, Harold Rosenberg wrote ...”

“... would know not only early Lurie but Waugh and Powell, Bradbury and Lodge, Mary McCarthy and Randall Jarrell, and preferably also something of the American summer school, the TV comedy To the Manor Born, Private Eye and the Reading Room of the British Library. Literary transmission would be an intolerably snug coterie procedure if, as some used to ...”

“... In Beckett; in Dylan; in the poets who keep a sharp eye for the ephemeral: Auden and Larkin. And Randall Jarrell: ‘You can’t break eggs without making an omelette. That’s what they tell the eggs.’ ‘The old adage might well be applied in many cases. Every man for himself’ (D. Yancey, 1795). ‘The captain ... ordered the sailor to leave the ...”