1. Randall Jarrell studied there under Robert Penn Warren, who first published Jarrell's criticism; Allen Tate, who first published Jarrell's poetry; and John Crowe Ransom, who gave Jarrell his first teaching job as a Freshman Composition instructor at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.
When Ransom left Vanderbilt for Kenyon College in Ohio that same year, a number of his loyal students, including Randall Jarrell, followed him to Kenyon.
Randall Jarrell taught English at Kenyon for two years, coached tennis, and served as the resident faculty member in an undergraduate dormitory that housed future writers Robie Macauley, Peter Taylor, and poet Robert Lowell.
Lowell and Randall Jarrell remained good friends and peers until Randall Jarrell's death.
Randall Jarrell went on to teach at the University of Texas at Austin from 1939 to 1942, where he began to publish criticism and where he met his first wife, Mackie Langham.
Randall Jarrell divorced his first wife and married Mary von Schrader, a young woman whom he met at a summer writer's conference in Colorado, in 1952.
The couple moved temporarily to Washington DC in 1956 when Randall Jarrell served as the consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress for two years, returning to Greensboro and the University of North Carolina after his term ended.
Sad to the point of inertia, Randall Jarrell sought help from a Cincinnati psychiatrist, who prescribed [the antidepressant drug] Elavil.
The idea of Randall Jarrell's death being a suicide was always denied by his wife.
Randall Jarrell's style responds to the alienations it delineates by incorporating or troping speech and conversation, linking emotional events within one person's psyche to speech acts that might take place between persons.
Randall Jarrell was first published in 1940 in 5 Young Poets, which included work by John Berryman.
Whichever side of the Atlantic one chooses to place Eliot, Randall Jarrell was his superior in at least one significant respect.
Randall Jarrell captured a world that any contemporary poet will recognize as "the poetry scene"; his Poetry and the Age might even now be retitled Poetry and Our Age.
Randall Jarrell wrote several children's books, among which The Bat-Poet and The Animal Family are considered prominent.
In 1957 Randall Jarrell began his translation of Goethe's Faust Part One for Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Randall Jarrell translated poems by Rainer Maria Rilke and others, a play by Anton Chekhov, and several Grimm fairy tales.