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 little rubelike. But if your goal is to discover what it was like, day by day, to be a literary waterfall of a man, it is the essays to which you will most profitably turn.

Collectively, the four volumes of Jarrell’s critical prose—Poetry and the Age (1953), A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1962), and the two posthumous volumes, The Third Book of Criticism (1969) and Kipling, Auden & Co.(1980)—assemble an ample and vivid portrait. “When you know Frost’s poems, you know surprisingly well what the world seemed to one man,” Jarrell remarked, and much the same could be said