Randall Jarrell: renaissance pending

It is not inconceivable that American literary criticism will come to its senses and encourage scholars and readers to pay attention, if not obeisance, to Jarrell. Rereading PICTURES FROM AN INSTITUTION, I had not before realized that he is one of those few writers for whom each sentence reads like a short story, with grace, direction, and balance within. Edmund Wilson, in other words. Doubtless there are studies explaining why balanced sentences marching along de-tum, de-tum, de-tum, can surprise us by being beautiful and elegant. Wilson's "The Author at Sixty" presses wee tears from squeezed eyelids, so soft and soothing are the lyrics of his reflection. Jarrell was known for enjoying a diverse palette of pleasures (sports cars, cats, football, opera; then: manners, a syntax of many forms of music, dissimulation of pompous boors, celestial navigation). There is nothing in PICTURES FROM AN INSTITUTION that denotes 1954, the year of its publication. We will wish that critics could explain why that is; perhaps cadence is the machine that produces time-travel? I have never known why I was born (in 1947) with a vein of disapproval and disgust deep within me for the work of Karl Shapiro, but I am just now learning that it was he (after all, and wisely) who asked persons to be reminded by Jarrell, of Rilke.
In some Vienna cafe, 2009, a man and a woman talk to one another over a table, into the night, coming and going (in love) and speaking of the shade tree that holds in its warm shadows the enrapturing counterpane of

Randall Jarrell + Marcel Proust
as one