Randall Jarrell Quotes
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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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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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One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.
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...just as great men are great disasters, overwhelmingly good poets are overwhelmingly bad influences.
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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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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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...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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From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
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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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We know from many experiences that this is what the work of art does: its life - in which we have shared the alien existences both of this world and of that different world to which the work of art alone gives us access - unwillingly accuses our lives.
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...the work of a poet who has a real talent, but not for words.
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It is G.E. Moore at the spinet.
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It is odd how pleasant and sympathetic her poems are, in these days when many a poet had rather walk down children like Mr. Hyde than weep over them like Swinburne, and when many a poem is gruesome occupational therapy for a poet who stays legally innocuous by means of it.
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A great revolution is hardest of all on the great revolutionists.
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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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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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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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If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help.
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Auden is able to set up a We (whom he identifies himself with-rejection loves company) in opposition to the enemy They...
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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.
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People always ask: For whom does the poet write? He needs only to answer, For whom do you do good? Are you kind to your daughter because in the end someone will pay you for being?... The poet writes his poem for its own sake, for the sake of that order of things in which the poem takes the place that has awaited it.
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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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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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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.'