“A good poet,” wrote Randall Jarrell in 1951, “is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.”

Born in 1914, Jarrell thought of himself as a poet all his life. But if we know him as great today, it is not for his poetry but for the criticism he wrote while standing around waiting for the lightning that never quite struck him. Belonging to the generation of John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell — those American poets who came of age just as the high modernist experimentation of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound was running down and who spent their poetic lives looking for something to replace it — Jarrell composed the most authoritative and enduring criticism ever written by a poet about his contemporaries. If he wasn’t among the best poets of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, he at least got to decide who was.