Randall Jarrell Quotes
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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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For this last savior, man,I have lied as I lie now. But what is lying? Men wash their hands in blood, as best they can:I find no fault in this just man.
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Most works of art are, necessarily, bad...; one suffers through the many for the few.
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A farmer is separated from a farmerBy what farmers have in common: forests,Those dark things - what the fields were to begin with.At night a fox comes out of the forest, eats his chickens.At night the deer come out of the forest, eat his crops.
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You give me the feeling that the universeWas made by something more than humanFor something less than human.But I identify myself, as always,With something that there's something wrong with,With something human.
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Most poets, most good poets even, no longer have the heart to write about what is most terrible in the world of the present: the bombs waiting beside the rockets, the hundreds of millions staring into the temporary shelter of their television sets, the decline of the West that seems less a decline than the fall preceding an explosion.
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The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
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Who would be such a fool as to make advances to his reader, advances which might end in rejection or, worse still, in acceptance?
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Let’s say this together: 'Great me no greats', and leave this grading to posterity.
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Animals, these beings trappedAs I am trapped but not, themselves, the trap,Aging, but without knowledge of their age,Kept safe here, knowing not of death, for death- Oh, bars of my own body, open, open!The world goes by my cage and never sees me.
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...man is the animal that moralizes. Man is also the animal that complains about being one, and says that there is an animal, a beast inside him-that he is brother to dragons. (He is certainly a brother to wolves, and to pandas too, but he is father to dragons, not brother: they, like many gods and devils, are inventions of his.)
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Age could not wither nor custom stale her infinite monotony: in fact, neither Age nor Custom could do anything (as they said, their voices rising) with the American novelist Gertrude Johnson.
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And the world said, Child, you will not be missed.You are cheaper than a wrench, your back is a road;Your death is a table in a book. You had our wit, our heart was sealed to you:Man is the judgment of the world.
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One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.
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What to leave out is the first thing the artist has to decide; a painter who 'held the mirror up to nature' would spend his life on the leaves of one landscape. The work of art’s fluctuating and idiosyncratic threshold of attention-the great things disregarded, the small things seized and dwelt on-is as much of a signature as anything in it.
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Many young poets, nowadays, are insured against everything. For them poetry is a game like court tennis or squash racquets - one they learned at college - and they play it with propriety, as part of their social and academic existence; their poems are occasional verse for which life itself is only one more occasion.
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Many poets...write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
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...we like somebody who succeeds with such bad conscience, and who seems to wish that he had the nerve to be a failure or, better still, something to which the terms success and failure don’t apply-as when Mallory said, about Everest: 'Success is meaningless here.'
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...most of the people in a war never fight for even a minute-though they bear for years and die forever. They do not fight, but only starve, only suffer, only die: the sum of all this passive misery is that great activity, War.
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Everybody must have wished at some time that poetry were written by nice ordinary people instead of poets-and, in a better world, it may be; but in this world writers like Constance Carrier are the well oysters that don’t have the pearls.
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People had always seemed to Gertrude rather like the beasts in Animal Farm: all equally detestable, but some more equally detestable than others...
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Death and the devil, what are these to him? His being accuses him - and yet his face is firm In resolution, in absolute persistence; The folds of smiling do for steadiness; The face is its own fate - a man does what he must - And the body underneath it says: I am.
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The Author to the Reader I’ve read that Luther said (it’s come to me So often that I’ve made it into meter):And even if the world should end tomorrowI still would plant my little apple-tree.Here, reader, is my little apple-tree.
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Many a writer has spent his life putting his favorite words in all the places they belong; but how many, like E.E. Cummings, have spent their lives putting their favorite words in all the places they don’t belong, thus discovering many effects that no one had even realized were possible?