Randall Jarrell

Gertrude Johnson, a novelist serving as a visiting lecturer at Benton, a girls' college, decides to write a biting satire on intellectual life at the school

A Comedy

Pictures from an Institution

There was once a little brown bat who couldn't sleep days-he kept waking up and looking at the world. Before long he began to see things differently from the other bats, who from dawn to sunset never opened their eyes. The Bat-Poet is the story of how he tried to make the other bats see the world his way. Here in The Bat-Poet are the bat's own poems and the bat's own world: the owl who almost eats him; the mockingbird whose irritable genius almost overpowers him; the chipmunk who loves his poems, and the bats who can't make beads or tails of them; the cardinals, blue jays, chickadees, and sparrows who fly in and out of Randall Jarrell's funny, lovable, truthful fable.

The Bat-Poet

A definitive anthology represents four decades of writing and includes new poems and previously published ones.

The Complete Poems

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.

The Animal Family

An anthology illuminates storytelling as a fundamental human impulse and includes ballads, poems, parables, anecdotes, fairy tales, and legends alongside short works by such figures as Anton Chekhov, Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence, and Leo Tolstoy. Reprint.

An Anthology

Randall Jarrell's Book of Stories

This selection of Jarrell's letters to friends and colleagues, including Hannah Arendt, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell, reveals his passion for ideas and people, and his uncompromising demand for excelle

An Autobiographical and Literary Selection

Randall Jarrell's Letters

Essays and Reviews, 1935-1964

Kipling, Auden & Co

After her husband is lost at sea, a lonely widow finds solace in the arms of his best friend. But this second chance at love takes a strange twist when the long-lost husband unexpectedly returns ...

Including The Woman at the Washington Zoo

Selected Poems

Gathers poems from each period in Jarrell's career, from narratives of wartime experiences to scenes from everyday life

A lonely hunter living in the wilderness beside the sea gains a family made up of a mermaid, a bear, a lynx, and a boy.

Twenty-two poems deal with solitude, mortality, man and woman, great art, and the recapturing of childhood through memory and imagination

The Lost World

A Comedy by Randall Jarrell

About Poetry and the Age: "Perhaps the most comprehensive and certainly the most detailed of all studies of modern poetry."-- Delmore Schwartz, New York Times Book Review "Randall Jarrell's book about poetry and the criticism of poetry pulls the bung-cork out of the barrel. The reader is exhilarated, led on to agree with Mr. Jarrell joyfully, even to cap his opinions--and at last to grow reckless. . . . Poetry and the Age is enormously readable."-- Louis Simpson, The American Scholar "The most powerful reviewer of poetry active in this country for the last decade. . . . Everybody interested in modern poetry ought to be grateful to him." -- John Berryman, New Republic 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?" One of the outstanding poets of the postwar generation, Jarrell was also celebrated for his extraordinary praise of some underappreciated older and younger poets and for his witty dismissals of current favorites he thought less qualified. Poetry and the Age includes groundbreaking considerations of Walt Whitman and Robert Frost as well as profound appraisals of Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, John Crowe Ransom, and William Carlos Williams. His early reviews that established the reputations of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop are here, beside other enthusiastic discoveries that have withstood the test of time. Poetry and the Age also contains Jarrell's influential essays on the obscurity of poetry and on the age of criticism, essays that offer some of the most relevant and readable literary judgments of the 20th century. Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) wrote eight books of poetry, five anthologies, four children's books illustrated by Maurice Sendak, four translations, including Faust: Part I and The Three Sisters (performed on Broadway by the Actor's Studio), and a novel, Pictures from an Institution. He received the National Book Award for poetry in 1960, served as poet laureate at the Library of Congress in 1957 and 1958, and taught for many years at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He was a member of the American Institute of Arts and Letters.

Poetry and the Age

During the night while everyone sleeps, a little boy floats up from his bed and flies through the house and the countryside beyond.

Richard C. Becker

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