Randall Jarrell: 1914-1965

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When Randall Jarrell died in October 1965, he left a body of poetry, fiction, and criticism that assures him a permanent place in American literature. Robert Lowell has written that Jarrell should be "compared with his peers, the best lyric poets of the past," and considers him "the most heartbreaking English poet of his generation," "the last of our great poet-critics." James Dickey writes: "I believe that Randall Jarrell will have something to say to people for a very long time to come, especially as the world tries increasingly to survive by inhumanity. . . .His poems give you the feel of a time, our time, as no other poetry of our century does, or could, even." Marianne Moore says of Jarrell's poetry and fiction: "The magic never ends."

Randall Jarrell, 1914-1965 is a collection of critical essays about his poetry and prose as well as personal memoirs and poems about Jarrell by a distinguished group of his admirers. Their assessments--often passionate, always illuminating--of the work and the rare individual who create it combine to make a volume that present and future readers of Randall Jarrell will find invaluable. Anyone concerned with the literature of our time will be interested in this composite portrait of Jarrell, as a man of letters and as a man.

The book includes a section of photographs taken through his lifetime and ends with "A Man Meets a Woman in the Street," a long poem that Jarrell meant for his next collection.

All royalties on Randall Jarrell, 1914-1965 will be donated, in the names of the editors, the contributors, and the photographers, to the Randall Jarrell Writing Scholarship at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.