Randall Jarrell Quotes
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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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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.
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The nurse is the nightTo wake to, to die in: and the day I live,The world and its life are her dreams.
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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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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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Kenneth Burke calls form the satisfaction of an expectation; The Man Who Loved Children is full of such satisfactions, but it has a good deal of the deliberate disappointment of an expectation that is also form.
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The ways we miss our lives are life.
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Be, as you have been, my happiness;Let me sleep beside you, each night, like a spoon.
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Goethe said that the worst thing in art is technical facility accompanied by triteness. Many an artist, like God, has never needed to think twice about anything. His works are the mad scene from Giselle, on ice skates: he weeps, pulls out his hair-holding his wrists like Lifar-and tells you what Life is, all at a gliding forty miles an hour.
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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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...just as great men are great disasters, overwhelmingly good poets are overwhelmingly bad influences.
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The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
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If you never look just wrong to your contemporaries you will never look just right to posterity - every writer has to try to be, to some extent, sometimes, a law unto himself.
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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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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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It is G.E. Moore at the spinet.
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Gertrude Johnson could feel no real respect for, no real interest in, anybody who wasn't a writer. For her there were two species: writers and people; and the writers were really people, and the people weren't.
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Malraux writes in a language in which there is no way to say 'perhaps' or 'I don't know,' so that after a while we grow accustomed to saying it for him.
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...Stevens does not think of inspiration (or whatever you want to call it) as a condition of composition. He too is waiting for the spark from heaven to fall-poets have no choice about this-but he waits writing; and this-other things being equal, when it’s possible, if it’s possible-is the best way for a poet to wait.
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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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New Directions is a reviewer’s nightmare; it’s enough punishment to read it all, without writing about it too.
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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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The motto of his Robinson Jeffers’s work is 'More! More!'-but as Tolstoy says, 'A wee bit omitted, overemphasized, or exaggerated in poetry, and there is no contagion'; and Frost, bearing him out, says magnificently: 'A very little of anything goes a long way in a work of art.'
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Compare the saint who, asked what he would do if he had only an hour to live, replied that he would go on with his game of chess, since it was as much worship as anything else he had ever done.