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Randall Jarrell: About and For Children

It is not surprising that Randall Jarrell would be a writer of children's stories. Throughout his poems, we find again and again the subject matter of childhood. There are the poems derived from well-known fairy tales and other works for children: for example, "The Sleeping Beauty," "Cinderella," and "The Marchen." Then there are the poems which tell of the daily lives of children: "A Girl in a Library," "A Sick Child," "The Girl Dreams That She Is Giselle." The most important literary figures of his timeÂ—his friends and admirers Â—recognized Jarrell as the poet of childhood. Robert Lowell said that the subject of childhood was for Jarrell, "what it was for his two favorite poets, Rilke and Wordsworth, a governing and transcendent vision."1 He was, "Monstrously knowing and monstrously innocentÂ—one does not know just where to find him ... a Wordsworth with the obsessions of Lewis Carroll."2 Reflecting on the "literary commonplace that American literature is essentially a child literature," Karl Shapiro observed that, "Our poetry studies behavior and leads us back to the child. With Jarrell, too, the child becomes the critic and center of value." He was, "the poet of the Kinder and the earliest games of the mind and heart. All those wounded soldiers and shot-down men turn back again into children, for a wounded man is again a child."3 Shapiro is specifically thinking of Jarrell's war-poems here, but he rightfully suggests that all his poetry shows an overriding concern not only with the experiences of childhood but with a general theme of childhood as a human experience continuing well into maturity. As James Dickey notes: