SOURCE: Nitchie, George W. “Randall Jarrell: A Stand-in's View.” Southern Review 9, no. 4 (autumn 1973): 883-94.

In the following essay, Nitchie presents a personal appraisal of Jarrell's poetry that emphasizes the poet's humanity.

I never met Randall Jarrell; and I can imagine someone, in about 1828, saying, “I never met John Keats,” and having much the same feeling about it—the same feeling of a stupid and irreparable loss, the same aggrieved resentment not just toward the outer world of tuberculosis and of automobiles in the dark, but irrationally toward the man, for having died. Did Keats really have to devote all that time and attention and infectability to his unimportant brother, to his impossible mother? Did Jarrell really have to take that walk, misjudge that car, or give way to that brainstorm? A colleague of mine says that the only way to teach Keats is to stand in front of...