Randall Jarrell and His Age

Randall Jarrell and His Age PDF Author: Stephanie Burt
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231500955
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 484

Book Description
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) was the most influential poetry critic of his generation. He was also a lyric poet, comic novelist, translator, children's book author, and close friend of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, and many other important writers of his time. Jarrell won the 1960 National Book Award for poetry and served as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Amid the resurgence of interest in Randall Jarrell, Stephen Burt offers this brilliant analysis of the poet and essayist. Burt's book examines all of Jarrell's work, incorporating new research based on previously undiscovered essays and poems. Other books have examined Jarrell's poetry in biographical or formal terms, but none have considered both his aesthetic choices and their social contexts. Beginning with an overview of Jarrell's life and loves, Burt argues that Jarrell's poetry responded to the political questions of the 1930s, the anxieties and social constraints of wartime America, and the apparent prosperity, domestic ideals, and professional ideology that characterized the 1950s. Jarrell's work is peopled by helpless soldiers, anxious suburban children, trapped housewives, and lonely consumers. Randall Jarrell and His Age situates the poet-critic among his peers—including Bishop, Lowell, and Arendt—in literature and cultural criticism. Burt considers the ways in which Jarrell's efforts and achievements encompassed the concerns of his time, from teen culture to World War II to the Cuban Missile Crisis; the book asks, too, how those efforts might speak to us now.

Poetry and the Age

Poetry and the Age PDF Author: Randall Jarrell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813021089
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 317

Book Description
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.

Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden

Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden PDF Author: Stephanie Burt
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231503976
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Book Description
''To read Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden is to read the best-equipped of American critics of poetry of the past century on the best-equipped of its Anglo-American poets, and we rush to read, perhaps, less out of an academic interest in fair judgment than out of a spectator's love of virtuosity in flight.'' From Adam Gopnik's foreword Randall Jarrell was one of the most important poet-critics of the past century, and the poet who most fascinated and infuriated him was W. H. Auden. In Auden, Jarrell found a crucial poetic influence that needed to be both embraced and resisted. During the 1940s, Jarrell wrestled with Auden's work, writing a series of notorious articles on Auden that remain admired and controversial examples of devoted and contentious criticism. While Jarrell never completed his proposed book on Auden, these previously unpublished lectures revise and reprise his earlier articles and present new insights into Auden's work. Delivered at Princeton University in 1951 and 1952, Jarrell's lectures reflect a passionate appreciation of Auden's work, a witty attack from an informed opponent, and an important document of a major poet's reception. Jarrell's lectures offer readings of many of Auden's works, including all of his long poems, and illuminate his singular use of a variety of stylistic registers and poetic genres. In the lecture based on the article ''Freud to Paul,'' Jarrell traces the ideas and ideologies that animated and, at times, overwhelmed Auden's poetry. More precisely, he considers the influence of left-liberal politics, psychoanalytic and evolutionary theory, and the idiosyncratic Christian theology that characterized Auden's poems of the 1940s. While an admiring and sympathetic reader, Jarrell does not avoid identifying Auden's poetic failures and political excesses. He offers occasionally blistering assessments of individual poems and laments Auden's turn from a cryptic, feeling, impassioned poet to a rhetorical, self-conscious one. Stephen Burt's introduction provides a backdrop to the lectures and their reception and importance for the history of modern poetry.

Randall Jarrell's Book of Stories

Randall Jarrell's Book of Stories PDF Author: Randall Jarrell
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9781590170052
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Book Description
Storytelling as a fundamental human impulse, one that announces itself at the moment, hidden in infancy, that dreams begin—this is what the poet and critic Randall Jarrell set out to illuminate in this extraordinary book. Here Jarrell presents ballads, parables, anecdotes, and legends along with some of the finest work of Chekhov, Babel, Elizabeth Bowen, Isak Dinesen, Kafka, Peter Taylor, and Katherine Anne Porter. This wonderful anthology, with its celebrated introductory essay, enlarges and deepens our perception of the storyteller's art and its central place in the world of our feelings. Contents RANDALL JARRELL: Introduction FRANZ KAFKA: A Country Doctor ANTON CHEKHOV: Gusev RAINER MARIA RILKE: The Wrecked Houses; The Big Thing ROBERT FROST: The Witch of Coös GIOVANNI VERGA: La Lupa NIKOLAI GOGOL: The Nose ELIZABETH BOWEN: Her Table Spread LUDWIG TIECK: Fair Eckbert BERTOLT BRECHT: Concerning the Infanticide, Marie Farrar LEO TOLSTOY: The Three Hermits PETER TAYLOR: What You Hear from 'Em? HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN: The Fir Tree KATHERINE ANNE PORTER: He ANONYMOUS: The Red King and the Witch ANTON CHEKHOV: Rothschild's Fiddle THE BROTHERS GRIMM: Cat and Mouse in Partnership E. M. FORSTER: The Story of the Siren THE BOOK OF JONAH FRANZ KAFKA: The Bucket-Rider SAINT-SIMON: The Death of Monseigneur ISAAC BABEL: Awakening CHUANG T'ZU: Five Anecdotes HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL: A Tale of the Cavalry WILLIAM BLAKE: The Mental Traveller D. H. LAWRENCE: Samson and Delilah LEO TOLSTOY: The Porcelain Doll IVAN TURGENEV: Byezhin Prairie WILLIAM WORDSWORTH: The Ruined Cottage FRANK O'CONNOR: Peasants ISAK DINESEN: Sorrow-Acre

No Other Book

No Other Book PDF Author: Randall Jarrell
Publisher: Harper Perennial
ISBN: 9780060956387
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
Randall Jarrell was only fifty-one at the time of his death, in 1965, yet he created a body of work that secured his position as one of the century's leading American men of letters. Although he saw himself chiefly as a poet, publishing a number of books of poetry, he also left behind a sparkling comic novel, four children's books, numerous translations, haunting letters, and four collections of essays. Edited by Brad Leithauser, No Other Bookdraws from these four essay collections, reminding us that Jarell the poet was also, in the words of Robert Lowell, "a critic of genius."

The Man Who Loved Children

The Man Who Loved Children PDF Author: Christina Stead
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453265252
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 733

Book Description
“This crazy, gorgeous family novel” written at the end of the Great Depression “is one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century” (Jonathan Franzen, The New York Times). First published in 1940, The Man Who Loved Children was rediscovered in 1965 thanks to the poet Randall Jarrell’s eloquent introduction (included in this ebook edition), which compares Christina Stead to Leo Tolstoy. Today, it stands as a masterpiece of dysfunctional family life. In a country crippled by the Great Depression, Sam and Henny Pollit have too much—too much contempt for one another, too many children, too much strain under endless obligation. Flush with ego and chilling charisma, Sam torments and manipulates his children in an esoteric world of his own imagining. Henny looks on desperately, all too aware of the madness at the root of her husband’s behavior. And Louie, the damaged, precocious adolescent girl at the center of their clashes, is the “ugly duckling” whose struggle will transfix contemporary readers. Named one of the best novels of the twentieth century by Newsweek, Stead’s semiautobiographical work reads like a Depression-era The Glass Castle. In the New York Times, Jonathan Franzen wrote of this classic, “I carry it in my head the way I carry childhood memories; the scenes are of such precise horror and comedy that I feel I didn’t read the book so much as live it.”

The Animal Family

The Animal Family PDF Author: Randall Jarrell
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 9780062050885
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description
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. 1966 Newbery Honor Book Best Illustrated Children's Book 1965 Year's Best Juvenile 1965 (NYT)

A Sad Heart at the Supermarket; Essays & Fables

A Sad Heart at the Supermarket; Essays & Fables PDF Author: Randall 1914-1965 Jarrell
Publisher: Hassell Street Press
ISBN: 9781013438943
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

The Bat-Poet

The Bat-Poet PDF Author: Randall Jarrell
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 006205905X
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 52

Book Description
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. Best Illustrated Children's Books 1964 (NYT) Year's Best Juveniles 1964 (NYT)

The Third Book of Criticism

The Third Book of Criticism PDF Author: Randall Jarrell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780374508920
Category : Comparative literature
Languages : en
Pages : 333

Book Description