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."
“I believe that Randall Jarrell will have something to say to people for a very long time to come, especially as the world tries increasingly to survive by inhumanity. . . . His poems give you the feel of a time, our time, as no other poet of [the twentieth] century does.” —James Dickey
“What Jarrell's inner life really was in all its wonder, variety, and subtlety is best told in his poetry. . . . Always behind the sharpened edge of his lines, there is the merciful vision, his vision . . . an illumination of life, too sad and radiant for us to stay with long--or forget.” —Robert Lowell
“Jarrell is the one poet of my generation who made an art of American speech as it is, who advanced beyond Frost in using not only a contemporary idiom but the actual rhythms of our speech. No other poet of our time has embalmed the common dialogue of Americans with such mastery.” —Karl Shapiro