Randall Jarrell, who died forty-four years ago last month, was an important post-war American poet and critic. Born in 1914, he established a reputation for himself with the publication of his second book of poetry, Little Friend, Little Friend, in 1945, when his scathing comments about other poets and writers also built his name as a hard and intelligent cultural commentator. He once wrote of the amateur poems he received that :

    "In the bad type of thin pamphlets, in hand-set lines on imported paper, people's hard lives and hopeless ambitions have expressed themselves more directly and heartbreakingly than they have ever expressed in any work of art: it is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with "This is a poem" scrawled on them in lipstick."

    兰德尔•贾雷尔 ......