Editing Randall Jarrell (section)

===Poetry===
In terms of the subject matter of Jarrell's work, the scholar [[Stephanie Burt]] observed, "Randall Jarrell's best-known poems are poems about the [[World War II|Second World War]], poems about bookish children and childhood, and poems, such as 'Next Day,' in the voices of aging women."<ref name="Burt"/> Burt also succinctly summarizes the essence of Jarrell's poetic style as follows: <blockquote> Jarrell's stylistic particularities have been hard for critics to hear and describe, both because the poems call readers' attention instead to their characters and because Jarrell's particular powers emerge so often from mimesis of speech. Jarrell's style responds to the alienations it delineates by incorporating or troping speech and conversation, linking emotional events within one person's psyche to speech acts that might take place between persons. . .Jarrell's style pivots on his sense of loneliness and on the intersubjectivity he sought as a response.<ref name="Burt"/></blockquote>

Jarrell was first published in 1940 in ''5 Young Poets'', which also included work by John Berryman.<ref>"5 Young Poets," published in 1940 by New Directions, contained forty pages of poems by each of the following poets: Mary Barnard, George Marion O'Donnell, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, and W. R. Moses.</ref> His first separate collection of poetry, ''Blood for a Stranger'', which was heavily influenced by [[W.H. Auden]], was published in 1942&nbsp;– the same year he enlisted in the [[United States Army Air Corps]]. His second and third books, ''Little Friend, Little Friend'' (1945) and ''Losses'' (1948), drew heavily on his Army experiences. The short lyric "[[The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner]]" is Jarrell's most famous war poem and one that is frequently anthologized.

His reputation as a poet was not firmly established until 1960 when his [[National Book Award for Poetry|National Book Award]]-winning<ref name=nba1961>
[https://www.nationalbook.org/awards-prizes/national-book-awards-1961 "National Book Awards – 1961"]. [[National Book Foundation]]. Retrieved 2012-03-02.
<br/>(With acceptance speech by Jarrell and essay by Scott Challener from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)</ref>
collection ''The Woman at the Washington Zoo'' was published. Beginning with this book, Jarrell broke free of Auden's influence and the influence of the [[New Criticism|New Critics]] and developed a style that mixed Modernist and Romantic influences, incorporating the aesthetics of [[William Wordsworth]] in order to create more sympathetic character sketches and dramatic monologues.<ref name="Burt"/> The scholar [[Stephanie Burt]] notes, "Jarrell took from Wordsworth the idea that poems had to be 'convincing as speech' before they were anything else."<ref name="Burt"/> His final volume, ''The Lost World'', published in 1965, continued in the same style and cemented Jarrell's reputation as a poet; many critics consider it to be his best work. Stephanie Burt states that "in the 'Lost World' poems and throughout Jarrell's oeuvre. . .he took care to define and defend the self [and]. . .his lonely personae seek intersubjective confirmation and . . .his alienated characters resist the so-called social world."<ref name="Burt"/> Burt identifies the chief influences on Jarrell's poetry to be "[[Marcel Proust|Proust]], [[William Wordsworth|Wordsworth]], [[Rainer Maria Rilke|Rilke]], [[Sigmund Freud|Freud]], and the poets and thinkers of Jarrell's era [particularly his close friend, [[Hannah Arendt]]]."<ref name="Burt"/>