Biographical and critical reports of Randall Jarrell can be found at Modern American Poetry, Academy of American Poets, and The Poetry Foundation. Jarrell was frequently covered by The New York Times.
Here's a Jarrell biography from Chapter 16, a community of Tennessee Writers, Readers and Passerby, biography of Jarrell:
"Two mysteries surround the life and career of Randall Jarrell: how he was able to accomplish so much in half a century, and whether or not his death at age fifty-one was accident or suicide.
"Born in Nashville, Tennessee, to Owen and Anna Campbell Jarrell, the family moved to California when Randall was only a year old. Owen Jarrell worked as an assistant to a children’s photographer, and later opened his own studio, but financial difficulties eventually led to marital dissolution. Randall, his younger brother Charles, and his mother moved back to Nashville at his maternal uncle’s request. Anna Jarrell began teaching English at a secretarial school, and Randall held his first job as a newspaper boy. He also sold Christmas wrapping paper door-to-door. The future man of letters was an excellent student, and fell in love with language through his readings at the Carnegie Library.
"Jarrell earned his Bachelor’s degree (1935) and Master’s (1938) from Vanderbilt University, where he studied with Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom, and was mentored by Allen Tate. Ransom left Vanderbilt for Kenyon College in Ohio, and Jarrell followed, working there as an instructor. During his two years at Kenyon, Jarrell met and roomed with poet Robert Lowell and established an enduring friendship with novelist Peter Taylor. Jarrell later accepted a teaching position at the University of Texas, Austin, another appointment of many that earned him positions at Sarah Lawrence College, the University of North Carolina and University of Cincinnati, and visiting professorships at Princeton, and the University of Illinois.
"Beginning in the 1940’s and into the following decade, Jarrell served as literary editor for The Nation, and as poetry critic for Partisan Review and Yale Review. He held the position of Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1956 to 1958, and was a m" ember of the editorial board of American Scholar for eight years, beginning in 1957.
"The pivotal experience for Jarrell came in 1942 when he volunteered for the U.S. Army Air Force. He began training as a flying cadet but failed to qualify, and then became a celestial training navigator in Tucson, Arizona. His exposure to military life was catalyst for much of his early work, including what is arguably his most anthologized poem, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” a sparse but powerful five-line piece about the dangerous occupation of a B-17 gunner who hung upside down in a plexiglass sphere to engage enemies attacking the plane.
"Jarrell’s first book of poetry, Blood for a Stranger, published after he began his four-year military stint, established his position of importance in the American literary scene. His next two books, Little Friend, Little Friend (1945) and Losses(1948) confirmed Jarrell as a major poetic voice. Not only was he respected as a poet, but Jarrell made a name for himself as a blunt and often feared critic through his biting reviews in major literary magazines, and in a book of essays, Poetry and the Age (1953). He worked successfully as a translator, short fiction writer, and novelist. Jarrell, in his final years, even wrote two children’s books, The Bat Poet (1964) and The Animal Family (1965), the latter illustrated by Maurice Sendak.
"Among his many accolades: a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, the Levinson Prize, Oscar Blumenthal Prize, National Institute of Arts and Letters Grant, and a National Book Award for The Woman at the Washington Zoo in 1960.
"Shortly after publication of his final poetry collection, The Lost World (1965), Jarrell suffered from mental illness, one moment experiencing complete joy and the next, depression. He attempted suicide in 1965 by slashing his wrist. Apparently recovering, he returned to teaching that fall. While admitted to a hospital in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for therapy on his injured wrist, Jarrell left at dusk for a walk along a busy, nearby highway. He was struck there by an automobile and died instantly. The coroner’s ruling was accidental death, but many of his closest friends believed Jarrell committed suicide. Jarrell’s friend, the poet Robert Lowell, expressed this belief in a letter to fellow poet Elizabeth Bishop: “There’s a small chance [that Jarrell’s death] was an accident … [but] I think it was suicide, and so does everyone else, who knew him well.”
"In what can only be considered a short but fruitful life, Jarrell left behind an impressive legacy: eight collections of poetry, influential criticism, a novel, numerous translations of Beckstein, Grimm, and Chekhov, and two books for children.
In Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life, William Pritchard states that Jarrell will be remembered as one of the best American lyric poets “for his brilliantly engaging and dazzling criticism, and for his passionate defence … of writing and reading poems and fiction.” Covering the memorial service held in Jarrell’s honor on February 28, 1966, the New York Times quoted Robert Lowell, who credited Jarrell with writing “the best poetry in English about the Second World War,” and described his friend as “the most heartbreaking poet of our time.”
I found a page for Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." The writer of the site quotes Jarrell: "A ball turret was a Plexiglas sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-24, and inhabited by two .50 caliber machine-guns and one man, a short small man. [See the photo below.] When this gunner tracked with his machine guns a fighter attacking his bomber from below, he revolved with the turret; hunched upside-down in his little sphere, he looked like the foetus in the womb. The fighters which attacked him were armed with cannon firing explosive shells. The hose was a steam hose." The poem appears below. It was published in 1945.
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Randall Jarrell won the National Book Award for his poetry collection, The Woman at the Washington Zoo, in 1961. His acceptance speech follows.
"Sometimes I read, in reviews by men whose sleep I have troubled, that I'm one of those poets who've never learned to write poetry. This is true: I never have learned. Sometimes a poem comes to me -- I do what I can to it when it comes -- and sometimes for years not one comes. During these times the only person who helps much is my wife: she always acts as if I'd written the last poem yesterday and were about to write the next one tomorrow. While I'm writing poems or translating Faust I read what I have out loud, and my wife listens to me. Homer used to be led around by a little boy, who would listen to him: all I can say is, if Homer had ever had my wife listen to his poems, he would never again have been satisfied with that little boy.
"It is customary for poets, in conclusion, to recommend poetry to you, and to beg you to read it as much as you ought instead of as little as you do. The poet says this because of the time he lives in -- 'a time,' writes Douglas Bush, 'in which most people assume that, as an eminent social scientist once said to me, "'Poetry is on the way out.'" Now poetry -- if by poetry we mean what Frost and Dostoevsky and Freud and Ingmar Bergman share -- isn't on the way out, unless humanity is on the way out; when poetry 'goes out of a place it is not the first to go, nor the second or third to go,/It waits for all the rest to go, it is the last.' Poetry doesn't need poets' recommendations. And perhaps it is a mistake to keep telling people that poetry is a good thing after all, one they really ought to like better; tell them that about money, even, and they will finally start thinking that there's something wrong with it. Perhaps instead of recommending poetry as a virtue poets should warn you against it as a vice, an old drug like love or dreams. We say that virtue is its own reward-know it too well ever to need to say so. Let me conclude by saying, about poetry, my favorite sentences about vice. They come out of Crime and Punishment. The murderer Raskolnikov is shocked at Svidrigaylov's saying that he has come to St. Petersburg "mainly for the sake of the women." Raskolnikov twice expresses his disgust at Svidrigaylov's love of "vice." Finally Svidrigaylov says with candid good-humor: "It seems to me that you have vice on the brain.... Well, what about it? Let's say it is vice. There is something permanent about this vice; something that is always there in your blood, like a piece of red-hot coal; something that sets it on fire, that you won't perhaps be able to put out for a long time, not even with years. You must agree it's an occupation of a sort.
"Poetry, art -- these too are occupations of a sort; and I do not recommend them to you any more then I recommend to you that tonight, you go home to bed, and go to sleep, and dream."
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