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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.
Randall Jarrell -
We live in an age which eschews sentimentality as if it were a good deal more than the devil. (Actually, of course, a writer may be just as sentimental in laying undue emphasis on sexual crimes as on dying mothers: sentimental, like scientific, is an adjective that relates to method, not to matter.)
Randall Jarrell
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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.
Randall Jarrell -
...'originality' is everyone’s aim, and novel techniques are as much prized as new scientific discoveries. T.S. Eliot states it with surprising naïveté: 'It is exactly as wasteful for a poet to do what has been done already as for a biologist to rediscover Mendel’s discoveries.'
Randall Jarrell -
But there is a Pope in the breast of each of us whom is hard to silence. Long ago a lady said to me, when I asked her the composers she liked: 'Dvorak.' I said before I could stop myself: 'Dvorak!' How many times, and with what shame, I’ve remembered it. And now I like Dvorak...
Randall Jarrell -
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...
Randall Jarrell -
Christina Stead has a Chinese say, 'Our old age is perhaps life’s decision about us'-or, worse, the decision we have made about ourselves without ever realizing we were making it.
Randall Jarrell -
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.
Randall Jarrell
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If Benton had had an administration building with pillars it could have carved over the pillars: Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you guilty.
Randall Jarrell -
At night there are no more farmers, no more farms.At night the fields dream, the fields are the forest.The boy stands looking at the foxAs if, if he looked long enough - he looks at it.Or is it the fox is looking at the boy?The trees can't tell the two of them apart.
Randall Jarrell -
...modern poetry is necessarily obscure; if the reader can’t get it, let him eat Browning...
Randall Jarrell -
The soul has no assignments, neither cooks Nor referees: it wastes its time. It wastes its time.Here in this enclave there are centuries For you to waste: the short and narrow stream Of life meanders into a thousand valleys Of all that was, or might have been, or is to be. The books, just leafed through, whisper endlessly.
Randall Jarrell -
We never step twice into the same Auden.-HERACLITUS
Randall Jarrell -
Most works of art are, necessarily, bad...; one suffers through the many for the few.
Randall Jarrell
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Sam is a repetitive, comic process that merely marks time: he gets nowhere, but then he doesn’t want to get anywhere. Although there is no possibility of any real change in Sam, he never stops changing: Sam stays there inside Sam, getting less and less like the rest of mankind and more and more like Sam, Sam squared, Sam cubed, Sam to the nth.
Randall Jarrell -
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.
Randall Jarrell -
One is forced to remember how far from 'self-expression' great poems are - what a strange compromise between the demands of the self, the world, and Poetry they actually represent.
Randall Jarrell -
If wishes were stories, beggars would read...
Randall Jarrell -
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.
Randall Jarrell -
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.
Randall Jarrell
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...if sometimes we are bogged down in lines full of 'corybulous', 'hypogeum', 'plangent', 'irrefragably', 'glozening', 'tellurian', 'conclamant', sometimes we are caught up in the soaring rapture of something unprecedented, absolutely individual.
Randall Jarrell -
...'progress', in poetry at least, comes not so much from digesting the last age as from rejecting it altogether (or, rather, from eating a little and leaving a lot), and...the world’s dialectic is a sort of neo-Hegelian one in which one progresses not by resolving contradictions but by ignoring them.
Randall Jarrell -
Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself.
Randall Jarrell -
The climate of our culture is changing. Under these new rains, new suns, small things grow great, and what was great grows small; whole species disappear and are replaced.
Randall Jarrell