Friday from the Archives: “The Indivisible Presence of Randall Jarrell” by Fred Chappell
with three poems by Randall Jarrell in NCLR 1992
It’s that time of year: students are moving into and returning to campuses across our great state. Budding writers, fervent readers, and curious historians everywhere will get to revel in meeting some of their literary icons: Cash (UNCA), Mott (UNCW), Rash (WNC), Simpson and Wallace (UNC), and so many more.
North Carolina has long been a place for incredibly talented, award-winning authors to make a home and ply their trade as professors. Fred Chappell wrote for our inaugural issue about meeting one of our first North Carolina Literary Hall of Famers, Randall Jarrell, as Chappell was just starting to teach at UNC-G in 1964. “He was as legendary as a teacher as he was as a writer; students signed up for his classes in hopeful droves and departed them regretfully but gratefully. After his death in 1965, I inherited his Modern Poetry class and 10 years later students were still quoting his classroom comments in their papers and examinations.
“How could they have known what he said so long ago and in such a limited space as a classroom? That problem remains a mystery to me, but serves to point up how warmly he was revered as a teacher.” Chappell wrote. “He had to draw the students’ respect mostly in his role as a teacher, I think, because no majority of the undergraduates would have read his poetry, though it was obvious from the battered copies of his works in the library that quite a few had tried him out.” Three of Jarrell’s poems accompany the essay and Chappell elucidates them all, reminding the contemporary reader that Jarrell’s poetry contains deep and vast intertwining with other poets, writers, and history.
Chappell ends with, “But Randall Jarrell wrote for the “uncommon reader,” as he tells us in “A Conversation with the Devil” (“I’ve some: a wife, a nun, a ghost or two”), the reader who was just as helpless and fallible as the human poet, but almost as inspired, too. Eager to be amused, enlightened, stirred, and intrigued, Jarrell himself was the best example of the uncommon reader. That, I believe, is what he desired from his friends and acquaintances – their best thoughts as well as their affections, their inspired minds as well as their faithful hearts.”
Read the entire essay on Gale Cengage and pick up a 1992 issue today!
