RANDALL, Julia

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Nationality: American. Born: Baltimore, Maryland, 15 June 1923. Education: Bryn Mawr School, Baltimore; Bennington College, Vermont, A.B. 1945; Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, M.A.1950. Career: Biology laboratory technician, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1946–48; instructor, Johns Hopkins University, 1949–52, and University of Maryland overseas extension, Paris, 1952–53; library assistant, Goucher College, Towson, Maryland, 1954–56; instructor, Peabody Conservatory, Baltimore, 1956–59; instructor, then assistant professor, Towson State College, Baltimore, 1958–62. Assistant professor, 1962–66, and from 1966 associate professor of English, Hollins College, Virginia. Awards: Sewanee Review fellowship, 1957; National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1966, 1982; American Academy grant, 1968. Address: Rt. 1, Box 64, North Bennington, Vermont 05257, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

The Solstice Tree. Baltimore, Contemporary Poetry, 1952.

Mimic August. Baltimore, Contemporary Poetry, 1960.

4 Poems. Hollins College, Virginia, Tinker Press, 1964.

The Puritan Carpenter. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1965.

Adam's Dream. Hollins College, Virginia, Tinker Press, 1966.

Adam's Dream: Poems. New York, Knopf, 1969.

The Farewells. Chicago, Elpenor Press, 1981.

Moving in Memory. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1987.

The Path to Fairview: New & Selected Poems. Baton Rouge and London, Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

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Critical Studies: "The Double Dream of Julia Randall" by Mary Kinzie, in Hollins Critic (Virginia), February 1983; "The Trees Win Every Time (Julia Randall)" by Marilyn Hacker, in Grand Street (New York), autumn 1988; by Fred Chappell, in The Georgia Review (Athens, Georgia), summer 1993; by John Alexander Allen, in The Hollins Critic (Hollins, Virginia), fall 1993; by Lawrence Joseph, in Kenyon Review (Gambier, Ohio), winter 1994.

Julia Randall comments:

It seems to me quite beyond the call of duty, modesty, or even common sense to answer questions about one's own verse. Influences? The usual ones for our time: Eliot, Yeats, Rilke, Stevens, Thomas; behind them Hopkins, Wordsworth, Dickinson, the great, ambiguous ghost of Milton, and the lesser ghosts of hymn and ballad makers. Also, very importantly, musicians, painters, naturalists, novelists, philosophers, and prophets. My subjects are drawn about equally from nature, especially the Maryland-Virginia countryside, and from the arts, which is to say about half my poems are literal and half imaginary. They are personal or local, rather than dramatic or topical. My forms are frequently traditional quatrains but tend now toward something larger or looser, with either sustained or irregular use of slant rhyme. I belong to no school that I know of. I try to achieve at least an articulation of the questions that particular experience seems to pose: How do we attach ourselves to or separate ourselves from each other or from time? How do we know? Where or to whom do we most belong? How do we mean? I try to write complete poems, sensible to the eye and ear as well as to the mind.

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The poems of Julia Randall are tough and compressed, with a complexity that demands much of the reader. They have hard lines in the traditional sense, taut and metaphysical, but they are also lyrical and musically beautiful, written in a language that sings even as it tightens into knots of fused words and ideas. The poems are highly allusive and are often witty in the fullest sense; the language leaps to imagination, and words contort themselves for the mind's delight. They are highly charged entities in which the arcane and archaic are alloyed with metaphysical passion into an active communion with the colloquial and the immediate. The times of her poems are precise and detailed, often carefully dated, but they open out, forward and back, into thought, memory, and belief, into what can best be termed imaginative mediation—the mind fully at work in the harmonies (and disharmonies) of the present, not analyzing and organizing it but rather experiencing it down to the very bone.

Randall's earliest poems were more self-consciously aesthetic, almost hermetic at times, but even in them she wrote from a commitment to the immediacy of experience, to learning from the inside out. An example can be found in the poem "Inscape I," from her first book, The Solstice Tree:

			You

that curl the blind hand over the breast,
sing for a sign, sign for a feast,
 
fasten the blade, explore the vein,
learn the familiar blood.

Following poems were more openly personal, less artificially wrought, while losing none of the compressed intensity of the early work. She addresses the world and her "masters" (Stevens and Rilke, Wordsworth, Lawrence, Woolf, and Yeats); she invokes them, plant and poet, stone and artist, demanding of them and of herself "what we see clear, but clumsily half-tell." What she sees is the world of bone and blood and words, but also the power of being itself, beyond and through them all.

I walked by the stream. The hay was loud
with bugs escaping; they know
what danger is. I too
feared once the many-bladed mower.
Once, but not now.

In her late work, in Moving in Memory and in the new poems in The Path to Fairview: New and Selected Poems, Randall continues her exploration of the self and its knotty relationships with the world, but she often does so in more open forms, loosening her line without losing the intensity of her lyrical expression. She examines old age and the sure prospect of dying with the same keen, ironic, and often exultant eye with which she has always examined the passionate and painful days of her living. She bemoans with sorrow and with rage a natural world wounded by pollution and callous human indifference, but she honors her craft and the work of predecessors that has shaped her life and world. Perhaps even more importantly, she values friendship that lasts, concluding her collection with these lines from "A Winter Gallery":

Nor camel king nor pastor, I
take messages at home.
Providing friendship abide,
a rod and staff are at my side,
whatever journey I must go,
what crux of craft or character,
whatever kingdom come.

—R.H.W. Dillard