he attended Vanderbilt University, majoring in
psychology and graduating with a bachelor of
arts degree in 1936. He then enrolled in a master
of arts program at Vanderbilt. During his years
at Vanderbilt, Jarrell studied under Fugitive
poets John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson,
and Robert Penn Warren. The Fugitives were a
group of southern poets whose goal was to pre-
serve traditional values, as well as traditional
poetic forms, in their work. Ransom became Jar-
rell’s mentor, and in 1937 Jarrell followed him to
Kenyon College, in Ohio, where he was a part-
time instructor as well as sports coach.
In 1939, Jarrell completed his master’s thesis
and also taught English at the University of Texas
at Austin until 1942. In Austin he met and married
Mackie Langham, and it was during these years
that his first collection of poems, ‘‘The Rage for
the Lost Penny,’’ appeared inFive Young Ameri-
can Poets(1940). Jarrell’s next collection,Blood
for a Stranger(1942), contained all these poems as
well as more than twenty new ones.
In 1942, after the United States had entered
World War II, Jarrell enlisted in the U.S. Army
Air Forces and undertook aviation training at
Sheppard Field in Wichita Falls, Texas. Later,
he trained in Illinois as a flight instructor and
celestial navigation instructor. From 1943 to
1946, Jarrell taught flight navigation in a celes-
tial navigation tower (a kind of dome) at Davis-
Monthan Field near Tucson, Arizona. Many of
his poems from this period are about the men who
fought in the air war.Little Friend, Little Friend,
which contained the poem ‘‘Losses,’’ appeared in
1945, followed byLossesin 1948. These two col-
lections gave Jarrell the reputation as one of the
foremost poets of World War II.
Jarrell taught for a year at Sarah Lawrence
College in Bronxville, New York, and then in
1947 became associate professor at Woman’s Col-
lege (now the University of North Carolina at
Greensboro). Jarrell published his next collection
of poetry,The Seven-League Crutches, in 1951, and
anovel,Pictures from an Institution, in 1954. He
also continued to write literary criticism, including
the collectionsPoetry and the Age(1953) andASad
HeartattheSupermarket(1962). HisSelected
Poemsappeared in 1955, and another collection
of poetry,The Woman at Washington Zoo(1960),
won a National Book Award. During the 1960s he
published three books for children,The Ginger-
bread Rabbit(1964),The Bat-Poet(1964), and
The Animal Family(1965). A final volume of
poems,The Lost World, appeared in 1965.
Jarrell was divorced in 1951 and remarried,
to Mary von Scharader, in 1952. He died after
being hit by a car on a county highway in Chapel
Hill, North Carolina, on October 14, 1965, at the
age of fifty-one. TheComplete Poems(1969) was
published posthumously.Poem Text
It was not dying: everybody died.
It was not dying: we had died before
In the routine crashes—and our fields
Called up the papers, wrote home to our folks,
And the rates rose, all because of us. 5
We died on the wrong page of the almanac,
Scattered on mountains fifty miles away;
Diving on haystacks, fighting with a friend,
We blazed up on the lines we never saw.
We died like aunts or pets or foreigners. 10
(When we left high school nothing else had died
For us to figure we had died like.)
In our new planes, with our new crews, we bombed
The ranges by the desert or the shore,
Fired at towed targets, waited for our scores— 15Randall Jarrel(AP Images)
Losses