SOURCE: Quinn, Sister M. Bernetta. “Randall Jarrell: Landscapes of Life and Life.” Shenandoah 20, no. 2 (winter 1969): 49-78.

In the following essay, Quinn traces Jarrell's poetic development through his depiction of landscape in verse.

Landscapes exist in the mind long after they stop being present to the eye. In both modes, they are partly created out of emotions aroused by what has happened in certain places. Through landscapes as laminated as those of Vuillard, Randall Jarrell tells the story of an individual life (his own or another's) and in addition relates the more comprehensive tale of life itself.

His days at Tarbox School, Nashville, Tennessee, brought him little happiness, if one can judge from the cumulative negative emotions built up by poems about his early youth. Yet with an inverted primitivism he persists in wandering back to the country of his childhood. His most vivid grade-school flashback has as its...