Randall Jarrell Quotes
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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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...just as great men are great disasters, overwhelmingly good poets are overwhelmingly bad influences.
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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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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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The ways we miss our lives are life.
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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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...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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...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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What Miss Moore’s best poetry does, I can say best in her words: it 'comes into and steadies the soul,' so that the reader feels himself 'a life prisoner, but reconciled.'
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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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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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Let’s say this together: 'Great me no greats', and leave this grading to posterity.
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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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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 usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces.
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A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad - and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry.
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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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Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we shall know everything the eighteenth century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.
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One thinks with awe and longing of this real and extraordinary popularity of hers Edna St. Vincent Millay’s: if there were some poet-Frost, Stevens, Eliot-whom people still read in canoes!
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Mrs. Robbins asked: 'If I am not for myself, who then is for me?'-and she was for herself so passionately that the other people in the world decided that they were not going to let Pamela Robbins beat them at her own game, and stopped playing.
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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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The Southern past, the Southern present, the Southern future, concentrated into Gertrude's voice, became one of red clay pine-barrens, of chain-gang camps, of housewives dressed in flour sacks who stare all day dully down into dirty sinks.
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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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If you look at the world with parted lips and a pure heart, and will the good, won't that make a true and beautiful poem? One's heart tells one that it will; and one's heart is wrong. There is no direct road to Parnassus.