I never realised what a treasure trove an Oxfam bookshelf can be until I snagged myself a brand new copy of Randall Jarrell’s Letters for the exiguous sum of £4. The letters, thoughtfully selected, edited and annotated by Jarrell’s second wife, span over three decades and chronicle the life of a man whose ‘work-and-amusement’ revolved around writing. Consequently Jarrell’s letters, akin to his critical collections, centre largely around his craft and in writing to Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Edmund Wilson, John Crowe Ransom, William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell and other contemporaries he speaks habitually of literature, its vertiginous peaks and dells, most often through a sustained colloquial effulgence that allowed his imagination to roam and range discursively not only over matters of literary interest but also personal and historical speculation.

The general consensus about Jarrell is that he was a better, more emphatic and puissant, critic than poet. I am inclined to agree and although his academic brilliance, intellectual dexterity and critical acumen were largely unmatched, his poetry has often been described as ‘derivative’ and ‘technically lacking’ – admittedly, his verse does not appeal to my aesthetic sensibilities (perhaps with one or two exceptions) – however this cannot be said of his collective missives studded and spiced with humorous musings, clever cogitations and spiffy apophthegms, often vacillating in tone and resulting in a quaint mixture of swagger, reticence, irreverence, meekness and superiority. Although if there's an aspect that defines Jarrell’s epistolary prose, it is his tendency to dash-off quick philippic sentences that strike the reader like a riding-crop. While this device repeatedly buoys the witty, jokey, affectionate, argot of his letters, it also comes to the fore in his professional endeavours most notably his critiques which saw him soar as an important, if formidable, arbitrator of American cultural climate from the 30s onwards.

Perhaps it’s no surprise then that Jarrell was feared among a smattering of garreteers, who ducked like frightened mergansers each time he poised his fountain-pen, much like a lancet, in their direction, since his astringently veracious outbursts went some way to making-and-unmaking reputations. I think it is important to point out that Jarrell, as a critic, did not discriminate in favour of his friends, nor mind their lepidopterous egos, accosting them in print whenever he felt necessary. Ironically Jarrell did not enjoy this vital sideline, once quoting Shaw’s remark about the critic’s fate in reference to himself: ‘His hand is against every man and every man’s hand is against him.’ But he excelled at it, endowed with an infallible taste and a daunting acuity, he often quipped about his subjects but avowed that he would never sacrifice a poet for the sake of a witticism (while the word 'never' may not be entirely accurate, the statement is essentially true). 'It would be a hard heart,' Jarrell once noted, 'and a dull head that could condemn, except with a sort of sacred awe,'. Although condemn he did, quite often, if without much pleasure and thereby earned himself a reputation as a 'terror'.

But the letters give us the man behind the polemic, behind the poems and the public-face which he himself at times detested. As such they are a priceless artifact offering an extraordinary plenitude of biographical, archival, and emotional information which plays a vital part in revealing the polarity between Jarrell’s private and professional persona. And so it seems that Robert Lowell, who once described him as ‘very tender and gracious’ but also as someone whose ‘frankness’ was often thought ‘more unsettling than the drunken exploits of some divine enfant terrible, such as Dylan Thomas,’ was right because in the end, irrespective of how you view it, the truth is always the same: ‘People ask you for criticism but they only want praise.’