Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life - Softcover

Pritchard, William H.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374522774 ISBN 13: 9780374522773

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992

Synopsis

This elegantly written study concentrates on the complex interaction between Jarrell's life and work, describing and commenting on his most important poems and prose, but also focusing on the significant events and experiences of his life. Pritchard dramatizes the ambiguous character of the man: a worshipper of childhood, deeply at odds with his own early years; a wonderfully commonsensical and humorous critic whose imagination was haunted by darker patterns of story and myth.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Pritchard ( Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered ) here seeks to give Jarrell (1914-1965) his due and offers a searching, spry elucidation of the poet-critic's complex character. Born in Tennessee, Jarrell was circulated among an extended family on the demise of his parents' marriage; after an abortive try at secretarial and accounting studies, he found his way to Vanderbilt University in 1932. Under the wing of such poets and critics as John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate, who all taught at Vanderbilt, he published his first poems. He also developed a formidable critical acumen, exercised later in devastatingly intelligent rebuffs and appreciations of poetic peers. Plumbing Jarrell's oddly narcissistic personality (his second wife, Mary, noted that "to be married to Randall was to be encapsulated with him"), Pritchard, though "no single-minded admirer of Jarrell's verse," convincingly praises poems as "performances, cunningly staged by an artist who knows how far to go in his rhetorical demands on a listening audience." Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Jarrell (1914-65) was, among other things, a poet, literary editor, and preeminent critic. Though he was active for three decades, his name is largely unfamiliar today. Using a lucid and detailed critical style, Pritchard offers a farily advanced level of analysis of this gifted and undervalued writer, particularly of his poetry. He provides no gossipy retellings of incidents, instead demonstrating influences through the usage of vocabulary, cadence, and structure. Recommended for those studying modern American poetry and new criticism, especially at the college level. For a more straightforward biographical approach, Randall Jarrell's Letters (Houghton, 1983) would be more appropriate.
- Janice Braun, Medical Historical Lib., Yale Univ.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0374522774
• ISBN 13: 9780374522773
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 352