Poet, novelist, critic, and teacher, Randall Jarrell was a diverse literary talent with a distinctive voice, by turns imaginative, realistic, sensitive, and ironic. His poetry, whether dealing with art, war, memories of childhood, or the loneliness of everyday life, is powerful and moving. A poet of colloquial language, ample generosity, and intimacy, Jarrell wrote beautifully "of the American landscape," as James Atlas noted in American Poetry Review, "[with] a broad humanism that enabled him to give voice to those had been given none of their own."
From the Introduction by the Author: “In this Selected Poems there are ten poems from my first book, some of them a great deal changed; almost all the other poems come from Losses, The Seven-League Crutches, or Little Friend, Little Friend. I left out “Orestes at Tauris” because, though I like it and some readers like it, it’s very long, it’s an earlier poem than any of these, and it’s back in print in the new edition of Losses. I left out several poems that I am still working on. Only two poems, “A War” and “The Survivor Among Graves,” are new; they belong with other poems about the war, and not with the poems I have written in the last three or four years.”
- Title: The Complete Poems
- Author: Randall Jarrell
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
- Place: New York
- Year: 1969
- Length: 507pp
- Dimensions: 5” x 8.23” x 1.5
- Condition: Cover in good condition—minimal wear and soiling in addition to some foxing. Small warped tear at the bottom corner of the spine. Pages clean—no tears or marginalia. Some small folds towards the back.