A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

He also wrote several children's books among which The Bat-Poet (1964) and The Animal Family (1965) are considered prominent (and feature illustrations by Maurice Sendak).

Randall Jarrell (May 6 1914 – October 14 1965) was an American poet literary critic children's author essayist novelist and the 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress a position that now bears the title Poet Laureate.