KIPLING, AUDEN & CO.
by Randall Jarrell
Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 381 pages;
$17.95
A sensitive, humane poet, a comic novelist, a children's fabulist and an exuberant spirit, Randall Jarrell was the terror of his fellow writers when he sat down to review them. He once said of Oscar Williams' poems that they appeared to have been "written on a typewriter by a typewriter." He complained of Kenneth Patchen's heavyhandedness by saying, "When Mr. Patchen hints, the pigs run in from miles around." He described the neo-Victorian poets Leonard Bacon and Witter Bynner as "traditional in the sense that an index is...
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