Randall Jarrell Quotes
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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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A great revolution is hardest of all on the great revolutionists.
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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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...'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.'
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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 bad poem in somebody’s Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and little emptier than, brushing one’s teeth.
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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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Compare the saint who, asked what he would do if he had only an hour to live, replied that he would go on with his game of chess, since it was as much worship as anything else he had ever done.
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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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Let’s say this together: 'Great me no greats', and leave this grading to posterity.
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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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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.
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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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It is G.E. Moore at the spinet.
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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.)
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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.
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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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We never step twice into the same Auden.-HERACLITUS
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Alexander North Whitehead is supposed to have said of Bertrand Russell: 'Bertie thinks me muddleheaded and I think Bertie simple-minded.'
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If we judge by wealth and power, our times are the best of times; if the times have made us willing to judge by wealth and power, they are the worst of times.
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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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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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IRENE ROSENBAUM: ...'you Americans do not rear children, you incite them; you give them food and shelter and applause'...
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Gertrude knew better than this, of course, but we all know better than we know better, or act as if we did.