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.
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Stephen Burt in Randall Jarrell and His Age ( 2002)Randall Jarrell
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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.
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
I am not a political person. My involvement in the Free Speech Movement is religious and moral... I don't know what made me get up and give that first speech. I only know I had to. What was it Kierkegaard said about free acts? They're the ones that, looking back, you realize you couldn't help doing.
Mario Savio
Many great writers have been extraordinarily awkward in daily exchange, but the greatest give the impression that their style was nursed by the closest attention to colloquial speech.
Thornton Wilder
The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, and anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its true place. When true silence falls we are left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness. (14)
Harold Pinter
Jarrell, Randall
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