Randall Jarrell

Randall Jarrell was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1914.
He earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Vanderbilt
University. From 1937 to 1939 he taught at Kenyon College,
where he met John Crowe Ransom and Robert Lowell, and then
at the University of Texas. His first book of poems, Blood
for a Stranger, was published in 1942, the same year he
enlisted in the Army Air Corps. He soon left the Air Corps
for the army and worked as a control tower operator, an
experience which provided much material for his poetry.

Jarrell's reputation as a poet was established in 1945,
while he was still serving in the army, with the
publication of his second book, Little Friend, Little
Friend, which bitterly and dramatically documents the
intense fears and moral struggles of young soldiers. Other
volumes followed, all characterized by great technical
skill, empathy with the lives of others, and an almost
painful sensitivity. Following the war, Jarrell accepted a
teaching position at the Woman's College of the University
of North Carolina, Greensboro, and remained there, except
for occasional absences to teach elsewhere, until his
death. Even more than for his poems, Jarrell is highly
regarded as a peerless literary essayist, and was
considered the most astute (and most feared) poetry critic
of his generation. Randall Jarrell was struck by a car and
killed at the age of 50 in 1965, in a death that may or may
not have been a suicide.