It's the birthday of poet and critic Randall Jarrell, (books by this author) born in Nashville, Tennessee (1914). Jarrell considered himself a poet, but he is best known as the most important literary critic of his time. In his critical essays, collected and published as Poetry and the Age (1953), he revitalized the reputations of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Williams, and he helped make the careers of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. He said, "It is better to entertain an idea then to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life."