An American Arbiter

Kipling, Auden & Co. By Randall Jarrell

Farrar, 381 pp., $17.95 “We are always complaining,” wrote Randall Jarrell, “that men of our time cannot unify, take any view of the whole of things.” He, too, could not unify. His verse and particularly his prose were shaped by the quickness of his wit. His poems were short and impressionistic. His one novel, Pictures from an Institution, was a deliberately static satire on college life, loaded with epigrams and malicious descriptions. As for his criticism, he was, as Leslie Fiedler pointed out, “not quite a critic finally, but rather a ‘real reader’ joined in a single body to a compulsive talker, who [turned] his conversation into an article . . . without ever losing the sense of breathlessness or the intimacy of the human voice.”

JR

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James M. Rawley

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Kipling, Auden & Co. By Randall Jarrell

Farrar, 381 pp., $17.95 “We are always complaining,” wrote Randall Jarrell, “that men of our time cannot unify, take any view of the whole of things.” He, too, could not unify. His verse and particularly his prose were shaped by the quickness of his wit. His poems were short and impressionistic. His one novel, Pictures from an Institution, was a deliberately static satire on college life, loaded with epigrams and malicious descriptions. As for his criticism, he was, as Leslie Fiedler pointed out, “not quite a critic finally, but rather a ‘real reader’ joined in a single body to a compulsive talker, who [turned] his conversation into an article . . . without ever losing the sense of breathlessness or the intimacy of the human voice.”