The New Criterion

Randall Jarrell once wrote, in praise of William Carlos Williams, “When you have read Paterson you know for the rest of your life what it is like to be a waterfall.” Yet there’s another way to ascertain what it is to be a phenomenon that flows, coruscates, sings, and revitalizes: you might turn to the essays of Jarrell himself. Thirty-four years after his untimely death, at the age of fifty-one, he remains a bright, propulsive presence. A powerfully attractive personality —witty, affectionate, energetic, and positively brilliant—emerges in his letters; in his beautiful, piercing poems; in assorted memoirs and a biography; in his photographs (the camera loved his spirited brown eyes and lanky torso); in his comic novel, Pictures from an Institution, and his four children’s books; and in the various recordings he left behind, in which the voice breaks boyishly and sounds, oddly, appealingly, just a ...

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