Randall Jarrell and His Age [Hardcover]

Stephen Burt (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0231125941 | ISBN-13: 978-0231125949 | Publication Date: January 15, 2003 0

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Ordinarily, a book-length study of an American poet-critic almost 40 years dead isn't news, unless the poet-critic is T.S. Eliot. Yet this monograph from Burt is an exception. Burt (Popular Music) is one of the leading poet-critics of his own emerging generation, turning out an astonishing amount of terrific review-based criticism in places like the TLS and New York Times from his perch as an assistant professor of English at Mac lester College in St. Paul, Minn. His project here is nothing less than the full-scale rehabilitation of Jarrell (1914-1965), who is best remembered for Poetry and the Age (1953), a series of essays that changed the way his contemporaries read Robert Frost (and told them how to read Robert Lowell, among other poets); his best-known poem is the searing "90 North," comparing self-exploration to polar exploration with magnificent results. Burt, playing off Jarrell's title, casts him as the product of an age preoccupied with Freud and Freudianism. Jarrell's particular psychological lens was developmental; he wrote numerous children's books, and his work expressed his "preoccupations with youth, age, and aging." After a preliminary biographical chapter, Burt traces Jarrell's elaboration of his major themes, tracking him through "Jarrell's Interpersonal Style," "Institutions, Professions, Criticism," "Men, Women, Children, Families" "Time and Memory" and other rubrics, bringing to bear a great deal of primary source social science that, as Burt shows, shaped Jarrell. Anyone with an interest in how the "Age of Anxiety" (an Auden poem Jarrell hated) expressed itself through one of its most sensitive souls will find this book a window into a lost intellectual world.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Burt (English, Macalester Coll.), author of an award-winning book of poetry as well as numerous essays on the subject, presents close readings of Jarrell's poetry and prose works, including his novel Pictures from an Institution and two of his children's books. After a brief biographical chapter, the critic examines the theme of self in Jarrell's poems, focusing on six approaches to this topic: the self as it depends on other selves, the self against society and institutions, psychoanalytic models of the self, the self in time, childhood and adolescence, and mothers, fathers, and families. This book began as a dissertation, and most nonscholars will find that the literary jargon can make for rough going; however, the frequent excerpts from Jarrell's poetry and prose, as well as the overviews of American culture and society during the three decades in which he flourished (from the 1940s to the mid-1960s) make this a required source for anyone doing research on the life and work of this noteworthy American poet and critic. For upper-level undergraduate and graduate collections.
Morris Hounion, New York City Coll. of Technology Lib., CUNY, Brooklyn
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press (January 15, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231125941
• ISBN-13: 978-0231125949
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,194,656 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I write books about poetry, essays on other people's poems, books of my own poems, and shorter pieces about poems, poets, poetry, comics, science-fiction writers, political controversies, obscure pop groups, and the WNBA. My writing has appeared in the New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the Believer, the Boston Review, and as part of the Songs from Scratch experiment at Minnesota Public Radio.

I am a Professor of English at Harvard University. Prior to joining the faculty at Harvard, I spent several years at Macalester College, first as an Assistant Professor, then as an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English. I received my Ph.D. in English from Yale University in 2000, my A.B. from Harvard in 1994.