Julia Randall

35, No.1), her honors include the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America (1980), the Poets’ Prize (1988) for her book Moving in Memory, as well as grants from the National Endowment of the Arts (1966, 1982) and the National Institute of Arts & Letters (1968), and a Sewanee Review Fellowship (1957).

After a year of medical school, a job as technician at the Harvard Biological Laboratory, she returned to Baltimore, poetry and an M.A.

In 1952 she married Kenneth Sawyer, art critic for the Baltimore Sun and the Paris Tribune; they divorced in 1962.

Poet Laureate Howard Nemerov wrote of her 1965 book, The Puritan Carpenter: “I had been getting glumly used to the notion that lyrical poetry was over for the present…And then came this beautiful collection…’Praise to the end!’” In 1973 she retired from teaching to write full time, moving to Glen Arm, Maryland, where she also became an environmental activist, helping to establish preservation ordinances for the Long Green Valley; this devotion to and deep acquaintance with the natural world was echoed in her poetry, as was her resistance to the land's desecration by developers.

In that same year, personal connections and Vermont's commitment to environmental activism drew her (with her perennial pair of terriers) back to North Bennington, where she settled permanently.

During her years there, though she read at The Library of Congress and San Francisco State University, she made relatively few public appearances; she had, as well, a principled aversion to self-promotion, “she did not bend to literary fashion…her poetry does not fit comfortably—or at all—among the “schools” that squared off against each other…” (Meg Schoerke, Mezzo Cammin, 2005)––all of which kept her work from being better known.

Nevertheless, she was reviewed and admired by many of her peers, received the Percy Bysshe Shelley Memorial Award of The Poetry Society of America for the body of her work in 1980, a second National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1982.

Rizzardi, Schwarz (Milan, 1958); Borestone Mountain Best Poems of 1964, Pacific Books (1965); The Hollins Poets, ed.

David Kerdia, Morrow (1978); Contemporary Southern Poetry: An Anthology, eds., Guy Owen, Mary C. Williams, Louisiana State University Press (1979); and Don’t Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review, ed.

Three themes recur in the many reviews of Julia Randall's work: the exceptional musicality of her lyric poetry, the anti-Romantic and more intimate way in which she approaches nature than her forebears, and the wit and intellect with which she combines the personal and the perennial, putting the Western literary tradition to her own anti-traditional uses.

Of her lyricism, Mary Kinzie has said that Randall writes “ a free verse as exact and rhythmic as fugue,” and poet Eleanor Wilner writes: “…Julia Randall's free verse has a long training of the ear behind it, and her cadenced, contrapuntal music is all the livelier for being free to play without fixed constraints—an aural music accompanied by another: the deep referential music of recurring emblematic figures whose names send resonant echoes down the otherwise silent corridors of time.” (Mezzo Cammin, 2005).

Dillard describes this imaginative reach across time and scale when he calls her poems “highly charged entities in which the arcane and the archaic are alloyed with metaphysical passion into an active communion with the colloquial and the immediate.” (“Randall, Julia,” Encyclopedia.com).

Of the originality and intellectual challenge of Randall's poetry, the way it changes the deep sources it draws from, Meg Schoerke (Mezzo Cammin, 2005) writes: “…Randall succeeds in being both traditional and radically anti-traditional in her poetry…[her] work often probes the Tradition upon which it rests…by engaging the Tradition from a female point-of view, Randall both creates a space for herself and also exposes the male poets’ limitations or blind sides…Setting herself against Wordsworth's ‘egotistical sublime,’ Randall strives to achieve humility before Nature…” Of Julia Randall's rejection of the tradition's separation from (and assumed superiority over) nature, Marilyn Hacker writes: “I have read few contemporary poets whose love and attention for the natural world so clearly integrated and included the thinking human creature, and human artifact, especially language, with that world (“The Trees Win Every Time,” Unauthorized Voices, 2010).

In the clarifying words of Randall herself, “the poet's job, strangely enough, is to ‘unwrite’ by going back to the beginning; to make such speech as we have faithful to ‘things as they are’ rather than to our arrangements of them; to make language live by confronting things with the ‘innocent’ mind of an Adam, by naming them to themselves afresh through the powers of that mind which is somehow continuous with them.” (“Genius of the Shore: The Poetry of Howard Nemerov” by Julia Randall in The Sounder Few: Essays from the Hollins Critic, eds.

Dillard, Garrett, Moore, Athens, GA, U of Georgia Press, 1971, p. 345) John Dorsey of the Baltimore Sun described her as "one of the most intellectual poets of the 20th century.

“Solitude and Isolation,” review of The Puritan Carpenter by Irvin Ehrenpreis, The Virginia Quarterly, Vol.

“The Trees Win Every Time: Reading Julia Randall” in Unauthorized Voices, Essays on Poets and Poetry, 1987-2009 by Marilyn Hacker (The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2010), pp.