Randall Jarrell Quotes
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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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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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New Directions is a reviewer’s nightmare; it’s enough punishment to read it all, without writing about it too.
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...just as great men are great disasters, overwhelmingly good poets are overwhelmingly bad influences.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 work of a poet who has a real talent, but not for words.
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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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...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 wishes were stories, beggars would read...
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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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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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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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Oscar Williams’s new book is pleasanter and a little quieter than his old, which gave the impression of having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter.
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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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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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...in this world, often, there is nothing to praise but no one to blame...