Randall Jarrell Quotes
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Marx said that he had stood Hegel on his head; often Mr. Horace Gregory has simply stood Pollyana on her head.
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It is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life.
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We always tend to distrust geniuses about genius, as if what they say didn’t arouse much empathy in us, or as if we were waiting till some more reliable source of information came along...
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A correct answer is like an affectionate kiss, Goethe said; a correct answer, Gertrude would have said, is like a slap in the face.
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A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.
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If we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a hundred, we say they aren't like politicians at all, and our category of politicians stays unchanged; we know what politicians are like.
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The best of causes ruins as quickly as the worst; and the road to Limbo is paved with writers who have done everything-I am being sympathetic, not satiric-for the very best reasons.
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One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups, to a child, is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.
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...girls who had read Wittgenstein as high school baby-sitters were rejected because the school’s quota of abnormally intelligent students had already been filled that year.
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To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all.
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The blind date that has stood you up: your life.
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Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so.
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In the United States, there one feels free... Except from the Americans - but every pearl has its oyster.
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An author frequently chooses solemn or overwhelming subjects to write about; he is so impressed at writing about Life and Death that he does not notice that he is saying nothing of the slightest importance about either.
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I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.
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I decided that Europeans and Americans are like men and women: they understand each other worse, and it matters less, than either of them suppose.
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He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors.
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When we read what Goethe says about men we are ashamed of what we have said; when we read what he says about painting and statues we are ashamed of what Goethe has said.
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Individualism, isolation, alienation. The poet is not only different from society, he is as different as possible from other poets; all this differentness is exploited to the limit-is used as subject matter, even. Each poet develops an elaborate, 'personalized', bureaucratized machinery of effect; refine your singularities is everybody’s maxim.
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The characteristic poetic strategy of our time-refine your singularities-is something Auden has not learned; so his best poems are very peculiarly good, nearly the most interesting poems of our time. When he writes badly, we can afford to be angry at him, and he can afford to laugh at us.
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...I simply don’t want the poems mixed up with my life or opinions or picture or any other regrettable concomitants. I look like a bear and live in a cave; but you should worry.
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The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
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How poet and public stared at each other with righteous indignation, till the poet said, 'Since you won’t read me, I’ll make sure you can’t' - is one of the most complicated and interesting of stories.
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A bat is bornNaked and blind and pale.His mother makes a pocket of her tailAnd catches him. He clings to her long furBy his thumbs and toes and teeth.And then the mother dances through the nightDoubling and looping, soaring, somersaulting -Her baby hangs on underneath.