Julia Randall

Julia Randall (1924–2005) was an American poet.

She was one of a number of female poets writing in English whose work retained rhyme and meter long past the time when they were considered fashionable by the U.S. poetry scene of the twentieth century. Even her work in free verse uses techniques like alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme.

Biography

Julia Randall was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1924. She graduated from Bryn Mawr School in 1941, Bennington College with a degree in English, and from Johns Hopkins Writing Seminar with a master's degree. She attended both Johns Hopkins Medical School and Harvard University but found that medicine and teaching did not leave her enough time to write poetry.

She wrote during the summers and taught in various schools: the Hopkins evening school, then known as McCoy College; a University of Maryland branch in Paris; Goucher College; the Peabody Conservatory; Towson University; and what is now known as Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. She retired from teaching in 1973.

In 1987, she moved to Vermont, where she lived until her death at the age of 81, on May 22, 2005.

Poetry

Julia Randall wrote seven volumes of poetry during her lifetime. She was awarded the Shelley Memorial Award in 1979/1980 in recognition of her outstanding poetry. Her poetry was included in No More Masks, an anthology of U.S. American women's poetry published in 1974. She received the inaugural, 1988 Poets' Prize for her volume Moving in Memory.

Critical commentary

John Dorsey of the Baltimore Sun described her as "one of the most intellectual poets of the 20th century."

Moira Egan said, "Her poetry is lean and spare.... She used a quiet care to describe the landscape of Maryland and the interior landscape of her own memory, her sense of loss and her own mortality."

Poetry collections

• The Solstice Tree (1952)
• Mimic August (1960)
• The Puritan Carpenter (1965)
• Adam's Dream (1969)
• The Farewells (1981)
• Moving in Memory (1987)
• The Path to Fairview(1992)