Randall Jarrell Quotes
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The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
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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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Many poets...write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
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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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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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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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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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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 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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...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 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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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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Few poets have made a more interesting rhetoric out of just fooling around: turning things upside down, looking at them from under the sofa, considering them (and their observer) curiously enough to make the reader protest, 'That were to consider it too curiously.'
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Most works of art are, necessarily, bad...; one suffers through the many for the few.
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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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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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Since Pharaoh’s bits were pushed into the jaws of kings, these dyings-patient or impatient, but dyings-have happened, by the hundreds of millions; they were all wasted. They taught us to kill others and to die ourselves, but never how to live. Who is 'taught to live' by cruelty, suffering, stupidity, and that occupational disease of soldiers, death?
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The ways we miss our lives are life.
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Most people don’t listen to classical music at all, but to rock-and-roll or hillbilly songs or some album named Music To Listen To Music By...
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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?
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A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry is a standard Oscar Williams production... ...the book has the merit of containing a considerably larger selection of Oscar Williams’s poems than I have seen in any other anthology. There are nine of his poems - and five of Hardy’s. It takes a lot of courage to like your own poetry almost twice as well as Hardy’s.
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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.