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Carl Sandburg, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Randall Jarrell were all significant authors of their times, writing on a variety of themes and employing many different styles in their writing. Randall Jarrell was quite the poet, but was best known for his literary criticism (Contemporary Authors Online (CAO)). When criticizing literary works, Jarrell was noted for possessing great knowledge on the topic, as well as employing a witty and at times acerbic tone (CAO). Jarrell’s cruel tendencies were deemed as “unbelievably cruel” by Elizabeth Bishop, but his vehemence was a barometer of his love for literature, and his commitment to promoting good writers was the source of his vitriolic reviews (CAO). J.C. Levenson stated this well when he said that Jarrell “could not help telling them to change a word, change a line, change their lives, but the demand he made came out of concern and not out of overbearing authority (CAO). As a poet, Jarrell was thematically diversified. During his lifetime he wrote about the “great Necessity” of the natural world and the evils of politics, the dehumanizing forces of war, loneliness and fear of aging and death, and the defeat of “Necessity” through imaginative recovery of one’s own past (CAO). Jarrell’s style of writing centered around a passion for clarity and the mastery of the modern plain style, with the intended effect of connecting to the primary feelings which move us deep down within (CAO). Carl Sandburg was a great American poet and biographer. One of his greatest biographical achievements was an impressive six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln. In his poetry he wrote about America in the American idiom for the American people (Dictionary of Literary Biography Volume 54 (DLB Vol. 54)). Sandburg found his subject in the American people and the American landscape (DLB Vol. 54). His topics on America included war, racial strife, lynchings, mob violence, and the inequities of the industrial society, many of which were realistically displayed in Sandburg’s Chicago Poems (DLB Vol. 54). While writing on these themes, Sandburg viewed himself as “one more seeker” in the long procession of humanity (DLB Vol. 54). As for his free-verse style of writing, twentieth-century critics seriously underestimated his influence in legitimizing and popularizing the free-verse form in American literature (DLB Vol. 54). Oliver Wendell Holmes’s writings came from an entirely different perspective than those of Sandburg and Jarrell.
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