Book Description

Customer Reviews (2)

My favorite America poet of the 20th century
Randall Jarrell was the very image of the academic poet. He wore beautiful tweeds. His beard was just-so. He drove a sports car. He was ferociously well-educated. (His wife teasingly called him "arrogant and pretentious." His response: "Wittier than anybody!") His classes were legendary. And he had a tragic death: hit by a car as he walked along a highway at dusk.

And, of course, he was accomplished. In addition to his poems, Jarrell was an acute critic --- those essays are collected in No Other Book --- who could build a case for a writer he loved or destroy an enemy with a line: Oscar Williams's poems, he said, give the impression of "having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter." He wrote a novel satirizing a college literature department. He loved fairy tales, and produced a brilliant translation of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

The poems? You've read him. You just forgot. Jarrell served in World War II. This is his classic poem, anthologized everywhere --- "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," in its entirety:

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

I love Jarrell for his later work, especially the poems from the collection, "The Lost World." He has a leering sense of sex, a warmly ironic take on the dance between men and women, and although he certainly understood men, his sympathies seemed to lay with the despair and hopefulness of women. Which is all to say: Despite what he knew, he was a total romantic. "A wish, come true, is life. I have my life," he wrote. Knowing what we do about his second marriage, we know that this satisfaction is not invented.

Some favorite lines:

While you are, how am I alone?...
Be, as you have been, my happiness;
Let me sleep beside you, each night, like a spoon;
When, starting from my sleep, I groan to you,
May your "I love you" send me back to sleep.
At morning bring me, grayer for its mirroring,
The heavens' sun perfected in your eyes.

A clever reader will plow through this book, pencil in hand, the better to mark lines to steal. Jarrell is that good. And that contemporary --- you won't have to stretch to make his poetry your own. Go ahead. No one will know. And I will never tell.

An interesting poet
I picked up this collection in order to read Jarrell's fairy tale poems that are included, particularly in "Once Upon a Time."However, with such a large example of his work before me, I found myself reading more and finding bits and pieces which spoke to me.I recommendthis collection for learning more about Randall Jarrell and his body ofwork. ... Read more

Book Description

Randall Jarrell (1914--1965) was the most influential poetry critic of his generation. He was also a lyric poet, comic novelist, translator, children's book author, and close friend of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, and many other important writers of his time. Jarrell won the 1960 National Book Award for poetry and served as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Amid the resurgence of interest in Randall Jarrell, Stephen Burt offers this brilliant analysis of the poet and essayist.

Burt's book examines all of Jarrell's work, incorporating new research based on previously undiscovered essays and poems. Other books have examined Jarrell's poetry in biographical or formal terms, but none have considered both his aesthetic choices and their social contexts. Beginning with an overview of Jarrell's life and loves, Burt argues that Jarrell's poetry responded to the political questions of the 1930s, the anxieties and social constraints of wartime America, and the apparent prosperity, domestic ideals, and professional ideology that characterized the 1950s. Jarrell's work is peopled by helpless soldiers, anxious suburban children, trapped housewives, and lonely consumers.Randall Jarrell and His Age situates the poet-critic among his peers -- including Bishop, Lowell, and Arendt -- in literature and cultural criticism. Burt considers the ways in which Jarrell's efforts and achievements encompassed the concerns of his time, from teen culture to World War II to the Cuban Missile Crisis; the book asks, too, how those efforts might speak to us now.

Book Description
Storytelling as a fundamental human impulse, one that announces itself at the moment, hidden in infancy, that dreams begin—this is what the poet and critic Randall Jarrell set out to illuminate in this extraordinary book. Here Jarrell presents ballads, parables, anecdotes, and legends along with some of the finest work of Chekhov, Babel, Elizabeth Bowen, Isak Dinesen, Kafka, Peter Taylor, and Katherine Anne Porter. This wonderful anthology, with its celebrated introductory essay, enlarges and deepens our perception of the storyteller's art and its central place in the world of our feelings.

Contents
RANDALL JARRELL: Introduction
FRANZ KAFKA: A Country Doctor
ANTON CHEKHOV: Gusev
RAINER MARIA RILKE: The Wrecked Houses; The Big Thing
ROBERT FROST: The Witch of Coös
GIOVANNI VERGA: La Lupa
NIKOLAI GOGOL: The Nose
ELIZABETH BOWEN: Her Table Spread
LUDWIG TIECK: Fair Eckbert
BERTOLT BRECHT: Concerning the Infanticide, Marie Farrar
LEO TOLSTOY: The Three Hermits
PETER TAYLOR: What You Hear from 'Em?
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN: The Fir Tree
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER: He
ANONYMOUS: The Red King and the Witch
ANTON CHEKHOV: Rothschild's Fiddle
THE BROTHERS GRIMM: Cat and Mouse in Partnership
E. M. FORSTER: The Story of the Siren
THE BOOK OF JONAH
FRANZ KAFKA: The Bucket-Rider
SAINT-SIMON: The Death of Monseigneur
ISAAC BABEL: Awakening
CHUANG T'ZU: Five Anecdotes
HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL: A Tale of the Cavalry
WILLIAM BLAKE: The Mental Traveller
D. H. LAWRENCE: Samson and Delilah
LEO TOLSTOY: The Porcelain Doll
IVAN TURGENEV: Byezhin Prairie
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH: The Ruined Cottage
FRANK O'CONNOR: Peasants
ISAK DINESEN: Sorrow-Acre ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

where dreams begin
this is a superb anthology of stories, poems, fables and more collected by poet/novelist randall jarrell to illuminate the notion of "storytelling as a fundamental human impulse, one that announces itself at the moment, hidden in infancy, that dreams begin..." authors include kafka, chekhov, rilke, robert frost, gogol, elizabeth bowen, brecht, peter taylor, hans christian anderson, the book of jonah, anonymous, the brothers grimm, isaac babel, chuang t'zu, blake, tolstoy, turgenev, dinesen, among others. reading this reaffirms why i love to read, and puts in to relief that narrative timelessness so often missing in contemporary fiction. strange and dreamy, each story swallows you whole. i've read this twice and will return again. ... Read more

Book Description

Amazon.com
Randall Jarrell's only novel features a Bryn Mawr-like women's college in which whispers and verbal shivs and sycophancy rule. "Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Benton had been endowed with one to begin with, and had smiled and sweated and spoken for the other." The institution's star-struck head is a Clintonesque young man particularly adept at raising money in Hollywood and who "wanted you to like him, he wanted everybody to like him--it was part of being a president; but talking all the time was too." Unfortunately, his new creative-writing hire only likes him the first time they meet. Thenceforth, she not only stirs things up but skewers them as well.

When the book was first published in 1954, most considered Gertrude Johnson to be a none-too-veiled portrait of Mary McCarthy. (The Partisan Review, for instance, failed to run a planned excerpt for fear of litigation.) "As a writer Gertrude had one fault more radical than all the rest: she did not know--or rather, did not believe--what it was like to be a human being. She was one, intermittently, but while she wasn't she did not remember what it had felt like to be one; and her worse self distrusted her better too thoroughly to give it much share, ever, in what she said or wrote." Pictures from an Institution is a superb series of poisonous portraits, set pieces, and endlessly quotable put-downs. One reads it less for plot than sharp satire, of which Jarrell is the master.Book Description

Customer Reviews (5)

The Supreme Academic Novel
Author Randall Jarrell's brilliantly witty, prophetic novel from the middle of the last century shows in their bud many of the absurd developments which have come to full flower in current American academe. Endless Tolerance, Creativity, and Diversity are already the buzzwords par excellence at fictional Benton College of the 1950's. Accordingly , Jarrell presents us with an art department whose members are so open minded (i.e. reluctant to judge between good and bad) that "if someone dipped a porcupine in chocolate and called it modern, they'd swallow it." Similarly, a creative writing department replete with published authors brought in to teach students more ambitious than talented flourishes at Benton. One such student, Sylvia Moomaw, has written a story of which she's singularly proud. It involves a bug which wakes up in bed to find itself turned into a man. "Influenced by Kafka," she shyly acknowledges, when talking about her "artistry" to the skeptical central character, Sydney. Finally, Benton College is especially self-congratulatory over its efforts at outreach, seeking token representatives for Diversity's purposes, even from an area as remote and unpromising as Tierra del Fuego, lest anyone be excluded. If artists generally see in advance of the rest of us, this novel may be adduced as evidence for the point.

Fall out of your chair, roaring funny!
I laughed out loud through the entire thing! People on the street would stop me and ask what was so funny.Randall Jarrell, a poet, and Mary McCarthy were on the Bard College campus at the same time in the '50's, when McCarthy was a writer in residence for a year.Jarrell shadows her cold-hearted fiction-gathering techniques, as she observes the Bard faculty in action(this is during the 1950's) for a book she wrote called The Groves of Academe.My piano teacher thought it was a mean-spirited view of McCarthy, but Jarell was a cose friend of hers; it's somewhat of a loving portrait.PS: Groves of Academe was also very good.Pictures is a "Making Of".

Disappointing
I was determined to like this book and gave it my best shot, but found I couln't bring myself to finish it.Yes, it's witty, but it's also hopelessly dated.The fifties had come and gone long before I was born, so I confess that many of the cultural references went right over my head.If you are looking for a spoof on academia, you're better off reading David Lodge or Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim.

Locked in an Institution
The title tells you right away that this book will be very clever, but it should also alert you that it is a series of satiric set pieces rather than a fully-realised novel.The narrator, self-effacing and elusive, turns his gaze on administrators and faculty at fictional Benton College more or less in turn although a flimsy plot takes us through the term.Some of the characters, notably the music professor, attain full stature as literary creations but the main object of the narrator's attention, the woman novelist, is presented with a cruelty that is difficult to comprehend within the story as we have it.It is clear that we are reading a roman-a-clef and I for one did not have the key.However, the narrator has a wonderful store of witticisms and parts of the book are very funny even if the total effect is uneven.

Really worth the read
Randall Jarrell's roman a clef about life in a small college, in that it centers upon a Mary McCarthyesque novelist who is herself embarking upon her own roman a clef (very much like THE GROVES OF ACADEME) about the "little people" who also trundle through the small college campus where she is allowed to stride magnificently like a contemptuous giantess. Thus the reader has the double pleasure of seeing her ironic views of the failings of the people around her contextualized by his or her ironic view of her own grosser moral failings. The giddy mise-en-abyme effect of this is tempered at the end, wherein the novel's narrating consciousness (our guide through this academic Wonderland ) must confront whether there is something to find beautiful--and sincerely--in this most artificial and insincere of playworlds. A wonderful work. ... Read more

Amazon.com
"Once upon a time, long, long ago, where the forest runs down to the ocean, a hunter lived all alone in a house made of logs he had chopped for himself and shingles he had split for himself." These words ease the reader into the elegant, dreamlike world of Randall Jarrell's Newbery Honor book The Animal Family. One night, the lonely hunter hears the singing of a mermaid, and because "he himself was as patient as an animal," the mermaid learns to trust him, speaking to him in a voice like the water. In time they teach each other their languages, with many amusing exchanges occurring as the hunter tries to teach his new friend terrestrial words and concepts.The hunter explains, "The house is a big wooden thing ... that you stay inside at night or when it rains." "Why?" she asks. "To keep from getting wet." "To keep from getting wet?" the mermaid says despairingly.

The mermaid and the hunter become a family when the hunter takes a bear cub from its mother to live with them as a son. "The bear's table manners were bad. But so were the mermaid's--especially as she couldn't resist throwing the bear pieces of fish." Having a bear around seems perfectly normal, but not quite a complete family, so eventually the hunter captures a spotted baby lynx. When the lynx brings home not another dead partridge, but a little boy, the delicate, playful family dynamics change again. This book of low-key epiphanies is packed with delightful, illuminating, often unexpected comparisons of the ocean world and the land world most non-mermaids wouldn't have considered. Enhanced by a beautiful design and gorgeous illustrations by Maurice Sendak, this book is perfect for any reader--young or old--ready for a bit of gentle philosophy with a decided twinkle. (All ages) --Karin SnelsonBook Description

This is the story of how, one by one, a man found himself a family. Almost nowhere in fiction is there a stranger, dearer, or funnier family -- and the life that the members of The Animal Familylive together, there in the wilderness beside the sea, is as extraordinary and as enchanting as the family itself.

Customer Reviews (19)

Perfection
This is a beautiful, timeless story, told in gorgeous prose, and charmingly decorated. I'm not the sort of person who gushes over books, but this one is true literary perfection, and not just for children. It's the kind of book that, no matter how old you are when you first read it, will stay with you for the rest of your life.

Gentle, old-fashioned, and whimsical.
This story by Jarrell is gentle, mythical, and stands the test of time.A short story about a solitary hunter on an island, who meets a mermaid, and together form a family with animals they meet.The tone is warm and soft, kind and at times bittersweet.

While perfect for bedtime, cold or rainy days, this book is appealing to me even as i grow older.The subtle lessons about companionship, newness, differences, loneliness, loss, and joy are not forced to the fore.Rather, an old-fashioned sense of creating an environment as a way to tell a story is key here.Inviting wilderness, homely relationships, and just enough magic and mystery to compel the story forward.

One of my most treasured books since i was a young child, the is a timeless and infinitely re-readable story.

Beautiful
I read this as a child.It got stuck in my mind, but I could never remember the title, thinking of it only as the story of the Hunter and the Mermaid.I searched for it for years.

This is a beautiful story, one of my favorites for children.

A fairy tale brought to life
Every once in a while, an author manages to pull off a novel that carries with it the exact tone and magical feeling of a fairy tale. In the genre of The Last Unicorn and The Princess Bride, this beautiful story takes you into a peaceful world where a lonely hunter lives by the sea.
The story follows the hunter's efforts to make a family for himself, and to keep that family safe. I don't want to spoil any of the plot points, but I will say that this gentle fable is going to fill each reader with joy and contentment. The tale is universal, and is just perfect for a shared experience at bedtime.
The decorations by Maurice Sendak are also quite lovely, giving us detailed sketches of the landscapes that the hunter and his family occupy.

The Animal Family
This book is truly what you would call a beautifully written piece of literature. It is the story of a lonely hunter who meets a mermaid. She comes to live with him despite being torn between her home in the sea and her love for the hunter. They live happily except that they wish for a child. Since to have a human child is not possible, the hunter first brings home a bear cub and then a lynx who become like their children. This story has a wonderful, dreamlike quality to it. The words and story flow lyrically and almost timelessly and the descriptions are simple and wonderfully vivid and beautiful. It will apeal to all ages. Children will like the funny story and gentleness of the words and teens and adults will find the deeper meaning as well as appreaciate the lovely scenes. This is a book you will want to read over and over. ... Read more

Amazon.com
"Most critics," Randall Jarrell wrote in a 1952 essay, "are sodomesticated as to seem institutions--as they stand there between reader and writer, so different from either, they remind one of the Wall standing between Pyramus and Thisbe." His complaint was as accurate then as it is now. Yet Jarrell himself had nothing of the literary obstructionist to him. The essays he wrote over the course of three decades--in which he mingled his assessments of poetry and prose with the occasional cri de coeur over the state of American civilization--always escort the reader directly into the inner sanctum of the work at hand. And they do so with such scintillating, comical brilliance that most other criticism seems to pale into testy insignificance. We should be grateful, then, that Brad Leithauser has assembled No Other Book, which returns to print many of Jarrell's imperishable picks and pans.

Jarrell's slash-and-burn style caused a certain discomfort among his fellow poets, particularly those who fell short of his sky-high standards. And indeed, his inspired jabs have lost little of their pungency or amusement: Oscar Williams's poetry, for example, "gave the impression of having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter." Even Walt Whitman, whose reputation Jarrell single-handedly repaired, gets the occasional spanking.

Only a man with the most extraordinary feel for language, or none whatsoever, could have cooked up Whitman's worst messes. For instance: what other man in all the history of this planet would have said, "I am a habitant of Vienna"? (One has an immediate vision of him as a sort of French Canadian halfbreed to whom the Viennese are offering, with trepidation, through the bars of a zoological garden, little mounds of whipped cream.)

Customer Reviews (7)

One of the Best Critics of the Century
I came across this book about a year ago.I picked up a used copy of it, and read "The Age of Criticism."Afterwards I could not put the book down.I was not familiar with Jarrell's essays, and they amazed me."The Age of Criticism" is one of the most prescient essays that I have ever read.These essays are in no way dated.They hold a position similar only to some of Dr. Johnson's best critical works.The only other comparison that I can make is to Paul Fussell.In other words, essays that are enornously insightful and will remain read (Unlike so many pieces of criticism).
After reading Mr. Leithauser's selection, I bought Jarrell's four books of criticism, and have read them all.Some of the reviewers have complained about Mr. Leithauser's choices.I think it is great.A wonderful introduction to Jarrell's great essays.Mr. Leithauser's short selections for "A Jarrell Gallery,"demonstrate quite easily the epigrammatic nature and customary brilliance of Jarrell (they include short selections from many of Jarrell's essays that he did not include in this Selected).In fact Mr. Leithauser's selection made me re-evaluate the editor.I still don't care for his poetry, but he's an intelligent man.
I highly recommend this collection to anyone interested in poetry (his essays on individual poets are exceptional.Though I often disagree with Jarrell's estimate of Graves, Williams, Moore, Cummings and others, they are nevertheless a delight to read--should not criticism be enjoyable??), the state of criticism (in other words, atrocious, which Jarrell had predicted--"The first generation [of critics] wrote distinguishably well; the second wrties indistiguishably ill; who knows how the third will write?"), and how criticism should be written (there is much we can learn here--he informs our own opinions (what he says of Pound, for example--much blue clay, but some wonderful diamonds within), he might change or force us to think about them, and he shows how to write).Jarrell can be a blistering critic, and that is delightful to read. What emerges, however, is not a cynical view or that of a curmudgeon, but an enormously positive approach simply to reading, and enjoying literature.He concludes one essay, brilliantly with, "Read at whim.Read at whim." He writes about what has so often been though, but never quite so well expressed.

Needed book
So much of Jarrell's prose is either out-of-print or just so hard to find, that we are lucky to have this book. For those who lament the inclusion of so many pieces on pop culture, they need to remember that some of those pieces made Jarrell both popular but also got him in trouble. To not include them would be to misrepresent Jarrell historically (and deprive us of some very funny writing). Unfortunately, there really were only 2 Jarrell essays on Auden (he never got around to writing the book he planned), and one of those is here. Everything in this book is useful, and this is a good representative collection ofJarrell's prose.

Yes, Another Book
Jarrell's lush communication style has always thrilled me. For the rare impact Jarrell's style has on me.

I am moved simply by the effort to bring Jarrell back to the fray.

It is enough for me to be touched once more by the rare combination of language-as-electrical current unique to Jarrell's voice.

I stick by my guns
The reader from Zion does have some legitimate points to make--that late essay on Stevens is sorely missed, and perhaps Brad Leithauser has indeed weighted the collection too heavily towards Jarrell's lamentations oncontemporary culture. Yet I still can't understand how anybody with an earfor English prose could complain about this delightful, witty,supernaturally wise collection. And the nitpicking about the book's"precious" production values is even nuttier--what did you want,a volume bound in corrugated cardboard? Until the Library of America wisesup and devotes a book to Jarrell--and really, between Poetry and the Age,Kipling Auden & Company, and The Third Book of Criticism, there'sPLENTY of material--this one will have to do. And it does, handsomely. Canwe stop the griping, please?

A Mis-selection
Quite unlike the last writer, I think the main failing of the selection is that it includes too many of J's sad-state-of-the-culture pieces, which are repetitive, certainly don't call on the best of his critical acuity, and ingeneral perhaps too general and in specifics often quite dated. This isn'tnecessarily bad, that they were addresses of and for the time, but I hadmuch rather had more of such pieces as the Auden and Housman, as well asthe Frost and Whitman, etc. The fine essay on Stevens last poems is aconspicuous absense, and there are others. That's the core of Jarrell andthe reason to read him (others, such as Dwight MacDonald, could write theDecline and Fall pieces quite as well). His insight and passion send youforth to poets you'd skipped and back to ones you thought you knew. Yes,the intro. is best skipped and there's something about the look and feel ofthe book I don't like--it feels a little precious in the bad sense. Butit's good to have J back in print---but why settle for this? Why not aCollected Essays (there isn't that much, sadly...)with selected passagesfrom the letters? By the Library of America? ... Read more

Book Description
Randall Jarrell was the critic whose taste defined American poetry after World War II. Poetry and the Age, his first collection of criticism, was published in 1953. It has been in and out of print over the past 40 years and has become a classic of American letters. In this new edition, two long-lost lectures by Jarrell have been added. Recently discovered by critics, they speak to issues at the heart of Jarrell's criticism: the structure of poetry and the question "Is American poetry American?" ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (1)

You can't go wrong with Faust
Johann's words are weaved into an intricate design that gives one a real peek into the life of Faust.With startling insights and a clear focused writing style, Johann has created a book that is easy to read, informative, and a must for your bookshelf. ... Read more

Amazon.com
In the years since his death in 1965, Randall Jarrell has inspireda wealth of tributes. Robert Lowell and John Berryman commemorated their friend and fellow poet in verse, while a lovely 1967 festschrift included contributions by the likes of Hannah Arendt, Alfred Kazin, Marianne Moore, Maurice Sendak, and Elizabeth Bishop (who recalled that Jarrell "always seemed more alive than other people, as if constantly tuned up to the concert pitch that most people, including poets, can maintain only for short and fortunate stretches.")

Still, none of these homages have quite the intensity or immediacy of Mary Jarrell's Remembering Randall. The author was married, after all, to her subject. And as she relates, their relationship involved a very high level of playful symbiosis:

To be married to Randall was to be encapsulated with him. He wanted, and we had, a round-the-clock inseparability. We took three meals a day together, every day. I went to his classes and he went on my errands. I watched him play tennis; he picked out my clothes. Sometimes we were brother and sister "like Wordsworth and Dorothy" and other times we were twins, Randall pretended.

From their home in North Carolina to Washington, New York, San Francisco, and London, Mary von Schrader Jarrell vividly describes the restless mind and free spirit they shared in their marriage. As she writes, "To be married to Randall was to be encapsulated with him." This engrossing, intimate collection could not serve as a better tribute. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Monogamy the way it's supposed to be
Let's paraphrase Tolstoy and say, Every happy memoir is alike, but every unhappy memoir is unhappy in its own way. And then let's point out that Count Leo was wrong. Happiness has a million gradations of its own--some ofthem frankly impossible to distinguish from low-grade misery--and is noless instrinsically monotonous than music played in a major key. Proof?This lovely, touching memoir by Mary Jarrell. Widow of the greatpoet-critic Randall Jarrell, the author never sends down her pathographicbucket in search of darkness, drugs, dementia, or erotic folly. Instead weget the details of a gloriously happy existence: the foods they ate, themusic they listened to, they cities they loved, even the sportyhaberdashery that Jarrell was addicted to. There's a sweetness here thatnever cloys, never curdles. And Ms. Jarrell turns out to be an elegant andattentive reader of her husband's poetry, forcing even a curmudgeon like meto take a second look at several poems. Still, this is a book about life,not art--and a memorable testimonal on behalf of boon companionship. ... Read more

Product Description
1980 Farrar, Straus and Giroux. First Edition. Hardcover, 381 pages. This fourth and final collection of Randall Jarrell's essays and reviews follows Poetry and the Age (1953, A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1962), and The Third Book of Criticism (1969), and makes available virtually all of jarrell's previously uncollected criticism. Written over a period of thirty years, these pieces include an early study of Yeats, a eulogy of Ernie Pyle, a section of Jarrell's master's thesis on Housman, a theory of modern literature entitled "The End Of The Line," a loving look at the sports cars of the fifties..... ... Read more

Book Description

''To read Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden is to read the best-equipped of American critics of poetry of the past century on the best-equipped of its Anglo-American poets, and we rush to read, perhaps, less out of an academic interest in fair judgment than out of a spectator's love of virtuosity in flight.'' From Adam Gopnik's foreword

Randall Jarrell was one of the most important poet-critics of the past century, and the poet who most fascinated and infuriated him was W. H. Auden. In Auden, Jarrell found a crucial poetic influence that needed to be both embraced and resisted. During the 1940s, Jarrell wrestled with Auden's work, writing a series of notorious articles on Auden that remain admired and controversial examples of devoted and contentious criticism. While Jarrell never completed his proposed book on Auden, these previously unpublished lectures revise and reprise his earlier articles and present new insights into Auden's work. Delivered at Princeton University in 1951 and 1952, Jarrell's lectures reflect a passionate appreciation of Auden's work, a witty attack from an informed opponent, and an important document of a major poet's reception.

Jarrell's lectures offer readings of many of Auden's works, including all of his long poems, and illuminate his singular use of a variety of stylistic registers and poetic genres. In the lecture based on the article ''Freud to Paul,'' Jarrell traces the ideas and ideologies that animated and, at times, overwhelmed Auden's poetry. More precisely, he considers the influence of left-liberal politics, psychoanalytic and evolutionary theory, and the idiosyncratic Christian theology that characterized Auden's poems of the 1940s.

While an admiring and sympathetic reader, Jarrell does not avoid identifying Auden's poetic failures and political excesses. He offers occasionally blistering assessments of individual poems and laments Auden's turn from a cryptic, feeling, impassioned poet to a rhetorical, self-conscious one. Stephen Burt's introduction provides a backdrop to the lectures and their reception and importance for the history of modern poetry.

Book Description
In this expanded edition of Randall Jarrell's letters, his widow, Mary, has added letters from Jarrell to Peter Taylor, publication of which was withheld during Taylor's lifetime. Taylor was, along with Robert Lowell, Jarrell's oldest and closest friend, and the inclusion of these incomparable letters adds another dimension of friendship, artistry, and intellect to a collection already noted for its behind-the-scenes glimpse of twentieth-century American literary history in the making. ... Read more

Book Description
Each audio production is accompanied by a book containing the text of the poems and a commentary by J.D. McClatchy.

Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) a Tennessee native, earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Vanderbilt University.His first book of poetry, Blood for a Stranger, was published in 1942, the same year he enlisted in the army.Jarrell’s reputation as a poet was established in 1945, with his second book, Little Friend, Little Friend, which bitterly documents the intense fears and moral struggles of a young soldier.He is highly regarded as a peerless literary essayist and is considered the most astute poetry critic of his generation.Jarrell was struck by a car and killed at the age of 50, in a death that may or may not have been a suicide. ... Read more