United States Poet Laureate Randall Jarrell was born to Owen and Anna Campbell Jarrell. He had one brother, Charles, who was a year younger. The family relocated to California in 1915 and his father was an assistant to a children's photographer in Los Angeles. Soon he was able to open his own studio, and his children often served as his subjects; thus, Jarrell's photographic record began early.

However, his father's business faltered and the family relocated to Long Beach. His mother suffered from ill health, and the marriage began to disintegrate. His mother's brother, Howell Campbell, agreed to move Anna and her children back to Nashville, Tennessee, and his parents later divorced. His mother became an English teacher, and Jarrell worked as a paper boy and sold Christmas wrapping paper door-to-door in order to help out.

Despite the sting of divorce and loss of having his father in his life, he did well in school and loved to visit the Carnegie Library in Nashville. Upon high school graduation he enrolled at Vanderbilt University, where he earned an A.B. degree. He then began a teaching career as an instructor at Kenyon College in Ohio. He later earned a master's degree from Vanderbilt. He then went to teach at the University of Texas at Austin, where he met Mackie Langham, whom he married. The couple would later divorce, and Jarrell married again in 1952, to Mary.

In 1942 he left teaching to join the United States Army Air Corp, serving as a flying cadet. He would go on to become a celestial navigation tower operator, a job title he later defined as the most poetic in the Air Force. Following the end of World War II, he accepted a faculty position at Sarah Lawrence College, and then taught at the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina. His first poetry collection was published in 1942, the same year he enlisted in the military.

His second and third books focused on his war experience and began to develop his own style and philosophy apart from his early mentor, W.H. Auden. His poem, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," is his most notable work and is often included in poetry and literary anthologies. Following his third volume of poems, he became better known as a critic. He helped to establish several poets, including Elizabeth Bishop and William Carlos Williams.

During his career he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a grand from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and was a 1961 recipient of the National Book Award. He was appointed Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1956, and served in that capacity until 1958. Despite his many accomplishments, Jarrell suffered from mental illness. He attempted to commit suicide later in life, and so when he died in 1965, struck by a car in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, friends and colleagues suspected suicide.