SOURCE: Cross, Richard K. “Jarrell and the Germans.” Modern Age 29, no. 3 (summer 1985): 250-55.

In the following essay, Cross centers on Jarrell's poetic fascination with all things German.

“I came into Randall's life,” recalls Mary Jarrell, “after Salzburg and Rilke, about the middle of Mahler; and I got to stay through Goethe and up to Wagner.”¹ Her readiness to mark stages of her husband's life in terms of people and places German finds an echo in Karl Shapiro's remark that Jarrell's Selected Poems might take as its subtitle “Hansel and Gretel in America.”² The world of Grimm's Märchen: that is in fact the substrate upon which the poet's response to German history and culture, as well as much else not specifically German at all, rests. “He was completely at home in the strange and intense poetry of German folk tales,” notes Hannah Arendt, to whose apartment Jarrell came...