Themes: Second World War, poems about bookish children and childhood, and poems, such as 'Next Day,' in the voices of aging women.

Poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, novelist.

Developed a style that mixed Modernist and Romantic influences, incorporating the aesthetics of William Wordsworth in order to create more sympathetic character sketches and dramatic monologues. Jarrell took from Wordsworth the idea that poems had to be 'convincing as speech' before they were anything else.

Took care to define and defend the self, his lonely personae seek intersubjective confirmation, his alienated characters resist the so-called social world.

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.

Poet, critic and teacher, Randall Jarrell was born in Nashville, Tennessee, to Anna (Campbell) and Owen Jarrell on May 6, 1914. Randall  attended the Vanderbilt University and later taught at the University of Texas. He  also taught for a year at Princeton and also at the University of Illinois; he did a two-year appointment as Poetry Consultant at the Library of Congress. Randall Jarrell published many novels throughout his lifetime and one of his most well known works was in 1960, "The Woman at the Washington Zoo". At the time of Randall Jarrells passing, Peter Taylor (A well known fiction writer and friend ) said, "To Randall`s friends there was always the feeling t