To have your poems criticized by Jarrell — when they didn't please him — was like meeting your fate, like a foretaste of death. To go with his daunting judgement, he had an unlimited stock of images for catching exactly each poet's inadequacies, so that their predicaments were far more vividly expressed than anything they themselves had written. Jarrell made literature out of their failure to make it.
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Anatole Broyard, "Accursed with Infallible Taste", The New York Times (19 May 1985)Randall Jarrell
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Jarrell's stylistic particularities have been hard for critics to hear and describe, both because the poems call readers' attention instead to their characters and because Jarrell's particular powers emerge so often from mimesis of speech. Jarrell's style responds to the alienations it delineates by incorporating or troping speech and conversation, linking emotional events within one person's psyche to speech acts that might take place between persons … Jarrell's style pivots on his sense of loneliness and on the intersubjectivity he sought as a response.
Randall Jarrell
His multiple and eclectic virtues — originality, erudition, wit, probity, and an irresistible passion — combined to make him the best American poet-critic since Eliot. Or one could call him, after granting Eliot the English citizenship he so actively embraced, the best poet-critic we have ever had. Whichever side of the Atlantic one chooses to place Eliot, Jarrell was his superior in at least one significant respect. He captured a world that any contemporary poet will recognize as "the poetry scene"; his Poetry and the Age might even now be retitled Poetry and Our Age.
Randall Jarrell
Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every coming together again a foretaste of the resurrection.
Arthur Schopenhauer
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.William Butler Yeats
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.Wystan Hugh Auden
Jarrell, Randall
Jarry, Alfred
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