Randall Jarrell was a poet, critic, and literary essayist. From 1937 to 1939 he taught at Kenyon College, where he met John Crowe Ransom and Robert Lowell.
Book Reviews
Winter 1941
Kafka’s Tragi-Comedy
Amerika by Franz Kafka. New Directions. $2.50 In Amerika one sees the beginnings of the method that is developed in The Trial and perfected in The Castle. The unity, concision, […]
Poetry
Winter 1964
Woman
"All things become thee, being thine," I think sometimes As I think of you. I think: "How many faults In thee have seemed a virtue!" While your taste is on […]
Poetry
Autumn 1954
The End of the Rainbow
Far from the clams and fogs and bogs —The cranberry bogs—of Ipswich, A sampler cast upon a savage shore, There dwells in a turquoise, unfrequented store A painter; a painter […]
Fiction
Winter 1954
Pictures from an Institution, Book III: Miss Batterson and Benton
Gertrude had replaced at Benton Manny Gumbiner, a writer who—as he himself said when, early his first winter, he left Benton—was too advanced for it; when his name was pronounced […]
Fiction
Winter 1953
Pictures from an Institution: Book I
[This is the opening of a fantastic novel. During the year we expect to print some of the episodes. —Editors.] Half of the Campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver, […]
Nonfiction
Autumn 1952
To the Laodiceans
Back in the days when “serious readers of modern poetry” were most patronizing to Frost’s poems, one was often moved to argument, or article-writing, or saying under one’s breath: What […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1952
Walt Whitman: He Had His Nerve
Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville seem to me the best poets of the 19th Century here in America. Melville’s poetry has been grotesquely underestimated, but of course it is only in […]
Poetry
Spring 1951
The Tower
He runs his eyes out idly, sliding Above the city’s grey diminished blocks, The patch of earth he has the claim of seeing. His world runs off and ends in […]
Poetry
Spring 1951
The Black Swan
When the swans turned my sister into a swan I would go to the lake, at night, from milking: The sun would look through the reeds like a swan, A […]
Poetry
Spring 1951
All or None
Each year, just as the blossoms Fall, and the buds curl from the boughs, I hear from the sky a wondering voice: The brass bird that drowses All year on […]
Poetry
Winter 1949
The Night before the Night before Christmas (1934)
In the Arden Apartment Only a community center and an apartment From the new lots and the old forest Of Hillsboro Manor Lived a girl and her father, Her aunt, […]
Poetry
Autumn 1947
The Clock in the Tower of the Church
(In the last years of the tenth century, over most of Europe, work on public buildings was discontinued, since the Second Coming of Christ was expected in the year 1000.) […]
Poetry
Autumn 1947
The Breath of Night
The moon rises. The red cubs rolling In the ferns by the rotten oak Stare over a marsh and a meadow To the farm’s white wisp of smoke. A spark […]
Poetry
Autumn 1947
The Child of Courts
After the door shuts, and the footsteps die, I call out, “Mother?” No one answers. I chafe my numb feet with my quaking hands And hunch beneath the covers, in […]
Poetry
Autumn 1947
Overture: The Hostages
The teacher, the preacher, my mother, a mouse Sit snarled in the circle the cat has stitched In the barn; and they shift all day in their rope Till one […]
Poetry
Spring 1947
The Rising Sun
The card-house over the fault Was spilt in a dream; your mother’s terraces Of hair fell home to hide The wooden pillow, the sleek dazzled head That bobbed there, a […]
Poetry
Summer 1946
A Chorus
You whom we blessFor the graves that bore us; for the pit of doom—Of our salvation; for the caves of breathShored with the bones of cities: life in which we […]
Poetry
Summer 1945
A Ghost, a Real Ghost
I think of that old woman in the songWho could not know herself without the skirtThey cut off while she slept beside a stile.Her dog jumped at the unaccustomed legsAnd […]
Poetry
Summer 1945
The Germans Are Lunatics
Of course, of course! Who else would dieFor profits from some thankless colony,And rot beneath the curt outlandish stoneFor markets long since settled as our own? Would any sane man […]
Poetry
Summer 1945
Losses
Bird of the spray, the tree of bones:The tendrils shower you with dew, the smellsOf petals patter in the holes of bone(The yellow nostrils feathered with a barThat stripes, like […]
New Verse by Five Poets
Winter 1944
The Carnegie Library, Juvenile Division
The soot drifted from the engines to the marble The readers climbed to: stone, and the sooty casts (Dark absent properties confused with crates And rest-rooms in the darkness of […]
Poetry
Winter 1943
Pictures from a World
Sailing to Tauris: the pitchy cave, The corpse bobbing, bleached, limp as oil, Days, hung at the wind's aging breast, (The sail had no shade, the place of the sun […]
Book Reviews
Autumn 1942
The Humble Animal
What Are Years by Marianne Moore. Macmillan. $1.50 I’ve read Miss Moore’s poetry too many years and too many times not to have the feeling that both the poetry […]
Poetry
Winter 1942
The Skaters
I stood among my sheep As silent as my staff; Up the sea’s massy floor I saw the skaters pass. Long like the wind, as light I flowed upon their […]
Poetry
Winter 1942
The Long Vacation
"In a minute the doctor will find out what is wrong And cure me,” the patients think as they wait. They are as patient as their name, and look childishly […]
Poetry
Spring 1940
For an Emigrant
I In that bad year and city of your birthThey traded bread for bank-notes weight for weight,And nothing but the statues kept the smileThe waltzers wore once: excluding, innocent,The face […]
Book Reviews
Autumn 1939
From That Island
Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay. By Louis MacNeice. Oxford. $3.00 Mr. MacNeice’s matter is more personal than his manner, which is highly unindividual; the straightforward, general, elevating tone, varied judiciously […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1939
Texts from Housman
The logic poetry has or pretends to have generally resembles induction more than deduction. Of four possible procedures (dealing entirely with particulars, dealing entirely with generalizations, inferring the relatively general […]
Book Reviews
Spring 1939
The Morality of Mr. Winters
Maule’s Curse. By Yvor Winters. New Directions. $3.00 “God,” said the dying man, pointing his finger, with a ghastly look, at the undismayed countenance of his enemy, “God will give […]
Poetry
Winter 1939
The Winter’s Tale
The storm rehearses through the bewildered fieldsIts general logic; the contorted or dispassionateFaces work out their incredulity, or stammerThe mistaking sentences. Night falls. In the litSchoolroom the hothouse guests are […]
Spring 2013
All Or None
From The Kenyon Review, Spring 1951, Vol. XIII, No. 2 Each year, just as the blossoms Fall, and the buds curl from the boughs, I hear from the sky a […]