Randall Jarrell Quotes
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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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A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry is a standard Oscar Williams production... ...the book has the merit of containing a considerably larger selection of Oscar Williams’s poems than I have seen in any other anthology. There are nine of his poems - and five of Hardy’s. It takes a lot of courage to like your own poetry almost twice as well as Hardy’s.
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Few poets have made a more interesting rhetoric out of just fooling around: turning things upside down, looking at them from under the sofa, considering them (and their observer) curiously enough to make the reader protest, 'That were to consider it too curiously.'
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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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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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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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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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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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...'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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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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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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Auden is able to set up a We (whom he identifies himself with-rejection loves company) in opposition to the enemy They...
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As Blake said, there is no competition between true poets.
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A great revolution is hardest of all on the great revolutionists.
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Most works of art are, necessarily, bad...; one suffers through the many for the few.
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We never step twice into the same Auden.-HERACLITUS
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The writer does not get from his work as he writes and reads it the same aesthetic shock that the reader does; and since the writer is so accustomed to reading other stories, and having them produce a decided effect upon him, he is disquieted at not being equally affected by his own.
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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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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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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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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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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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...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.