SOURCE: Hammer, Langdon. “Who Was Randall Jarrell?” Yale Review 79, no. 2 (spring 1990): 389-405.

In the following essay, Hammer chronicles Jarrell's career as a postwar American poet, concentrating on his attempts to reassess the poetic values of his generation.

Even twenty-five years after his death, Randall Jarrell is widely admired as the virtuosic reviewer of poetry who regularly appeared in literary quarterlies such as this one. He is also known as the author of a short, shocking, riddle-like poem called “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” and, though less widely, a dramatic monologue called “The Woman at the Washington Zoo.” A small group of readers will recall Pictures from an Institution, Jarrell's relentlessly witty attack on academic life; others will have read as children one of the four fables Jarrell wrote at the end of his career. For all of these reasons, Jarrell seems like a familiar figure from...