The ways we miss our lives are life.
—Randall Jarrell, “A Girl in a Library”

Who was Randall Jarrell? Doubtless his poetry has misled more than a few casual readers into thinking that it holds easy answers to this question. For if the elegant, well-bred manner of his most familiar poems seems closer to that of Elizabeth Bishop than to the emotional turbulence of so-called confessional poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, the subject matter of much of Jarrell’s verse seems, on first blush, to be frankly autobiographical. The first-person singular pronoun crops up frequently. A typical early poem, “A Camp in the Prussian Forest” (1946), begins: “I walk beside the prisoners to the road.” The opening lines of a typical later poem, “The Player Piano” (1965), read: “I ate pancakes one night in a Pancake House / run by a lady my age.” But the relation between the events presented in these poems and Jarrell’s own life and personality proves to be far from straightforward. Though “A Camp in the Prussian Forest,” like many of the poems from the collections Little Friend, Little Friend (1945) and Losses (1948), takes place in war-torn Europe, the fact is that Jarrell, who served in the Army Air Corps, never left the States during World War II and didn’t visit Europe until two years after the poem’s composition; as for “The Player Piano,” its speaker—like those in many of the poems that Jarrell gathered in The Woman at the Washington