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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!
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
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...the really damned not only like Hell, they feel loyal to it...
Randall Jarrell -
Since Pharaoh’s bits were pushed into the jaws of kings, these dyings-patient or impatient, but dyings-have happened, by the hundreds of millions; they were all wasted. They taught us to kill others and to die ourselves, but never how to live. Who is 'taught to live' by cruelty, suffering, stupidity, and that occupational disease of soldiers, death?
Randall Jarrell -
If poetry were nothing but texture, Dylan Thomas would be as good as any poet alive. The what of his poems is hardly essential to their success, and the best and most brilliantly written pieces usually say less than the worst.
Randall Jarrell -
...the work of a poet who has a real talent, but not for words.
Randall Jarrell -
It is rare for a novel to have an ending as good as its middle and beginning...
Randall Jarrell -
Both in verse and in prose Karl Shapiro loves, partly out of indignation and partly out of sheer mischievousness, to tell the naked truths or half-truths or quarter-truths that will make anybody’s hair stand on end; he is always crying: 'But he hasn’t any clothes on!' about an emperor who is half the time surprisingly well-dressed.
Randall Jarrell
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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.
Randall Jarrell -
When you’re young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
Randall Jarrell -
Gertrude knew better than this, of course, but we all know better than we know better, or act as if we did.
Randall Jarrell -
Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise; a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.
Randall Jarrell -
Most poets, most good poets even, no longer have the heart to write about what is most terrible in the world of the present: the bombs waiting beside the rockets, the hundreds of millions staring into the temporary shelter of their television sets, the decline of the West that seems less a decline than the fall preceding an explosion.
Randall Jarrell -
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.
Randall Jarrell
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...whether they write poems or don’t write poems, poets are best.
Randall Jarrell -
As Blake said, there is no competition between true poets.
Randall Jarrell -
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.
Randall Jarrell -
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.
Randall Jarrell -
This sort of admission of error, of change, makes us trust a critic as nothing else but omniscience could...
Randall Jarrell -
In Heaven all reviews will be favorable; here on earth, the publisher realizes, plausibility demands an occasional bad one, some convincing lump in all that leaven, and he accepts it somewhat as a theologian accepts Evil.
Randall Jarrell
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Taking the chance of making a complete fool of himself - and, sometimes, doing so - is the first demand that is made upon any real critic: he must stick his neck out just as the artist does, if he is to be of any real use to art.
Randall Jarrell -
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?
Randall Jarrell -
...a poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it...
Randall Jarrell -
Somewhere there must be Something that's different from everything. All that I've never thought of - think of me!
Randall Jarrell