Randall Jarrell Quotes
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Goethe said, 'The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing'; Somerset Maugham says that the finest compliment he ever received was a letter in which one of his readers said: 'I read your novel without having to look up a single word in the dictionary.' These writers, plainly, lived in different worlds.
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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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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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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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We were given drinks, and drank them, and talked while we drank them. But talked, here, is a euphemism: we had that conversation about how you make a Martini. The people in Hell, Dr. Rosenbaum had told me once, say nothing but What? Americans in Hell tell each other how to make Martinis.
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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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...the work of a poet who has a real talent, but not for words.
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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.
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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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If wishes were stories, beggars would read...
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...in this world, often, there is nothing to praise but no one to blame...
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A great revolution is hardest of all on the great revolutionists.
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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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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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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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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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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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...'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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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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How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel?
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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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President Robbins was so well adjusted to his environment that sometimes you could not tell which was the environment and which was President Robbins.
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It is G.E. Moore at the spinet.
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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.