Randall Jarrell Quotes
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...when General Eisenhower defined an intellectual as 'a man who takes more words than is necessary to tell more than he knows', he was speaking not as a Republican but as an American.
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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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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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...'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.
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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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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.
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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 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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...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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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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Let’s say this together: 'Great me no greats', and leave this grading to posterity.
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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.
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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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Most works of art are, necessarily, bad...; one suffers through the many for the few.
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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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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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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.
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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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A poem is sort of an onion of contexts, and you can no more locate any of the important meanings exclusively in a part than you can locate a relation in one of its terms. The significance of a part may be greatly modified or even in extreme cases completely reversed by later and larger parts and by the whole.
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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.
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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...
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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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It is rare for a novel to have an ending as good as its middle and beginning...
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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.