‘For wars his life and half a world away’

Randall Jarrell is arguably the most influential American poet of the Second World War, and also one of the most moving, persuasive and original poets of aerial warfare. As David Perkins puts it, ‘He expresses the pity and protest typical of the better poets of the First World War […] but also a nexus of other feelings [which] persist’. What makes it all the more intriguing is that he did so without taking part in any active combat whatsoever: Jarrell lived through both world wars and served in the second, but was never remotely close to where any of the action took place.

His youth was spent largely in Tennessee, where he was born in 1914, though the family moved to California the following year so that his father could run a photographer's studio. When Jarrell was ten his parents separated, and other than a year living with his paternal grandparents in Los Angeles, most of his adolescence was spent back in Tennessee with his mother. As a teenager his two obvious talents and passions were for tennis and literature, and from a young age his career ambitions were literary. After high school he studied at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where he found himself in the company of men such as John Crowe Ransom, already a very well-known poet, and Robert Penn Warren, who was then a graduate student. Soon, with the help of these men, he had started publishing poems of his own.

Ransom, Warren, Allen Tate and others at Vanderbilt were associated with the Fugitives, and then with Agrarianism, both of which were cultural movements centred on Vanderbilt and rooted in Southern conservative political and social concerns. Jarrell showed little interest in these social perspectives and more in those of Marx and of Auden, but Ransom in particular was a huge influence on him in other ways. When Ransom took a job in Ohio, at Kenyon College, Jarrell followed in order to work as his assistant. By this time Jarrell had already started to make a name for himself as a witty, astute and sometimes biting poetry critic, but his reputation as a poet was slower to develop.