SOURCE: Mazzaro, Jerome. “Arnoldian Echoes in the Poetry of Randall Jarrell.” Western Humanities Review 23, no. 4 (autumn 1969): 314-18.

In the following essay, Mazzaro views Jarrell as a talented but secondary poet, and draws analogies between his status and that of Matthew Arnold.

In his lifetime Randall Jarrell found his poetry consistently praised in reviews, yet excluded from the powerful Oscar Williams' anthologies and ignored by all but a National Book Awards committee in 1961. As a result, it never quite succeeded into popular acceptance or acclaim. The appearance of The Complete Poems (1969) should add to discussions of why this occurred as well as to discussions of Jarrell's proper place among the poets of his generation. I very much doubt, however, that the judgment of Karl Shapiro rendered in 1965, shortly after Jarrell's death, that he had outpaced all of his contemporaries, will prevail. Given Jarrell's own need to excel, to go...