Randall Jarrell Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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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Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise; a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.
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At night there are no more farmers, no more farms.At night the fields dream, the fields are the forest.The boy stands looking at the foxAs if, if he looked long enough - he looks at it.Or is it the fox is looking at the boy?The trees can't tell the two of them apart.
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...modern poetry is necessarily obscure; if the reader can’t get it, let him eat Browning...
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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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Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we shall know everything the eighteenth century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.
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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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...the really damned not only like Hell, they feel loyal to it...
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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.
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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.
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This sort of admission of error, of change, makes us trust a critic as nothing else but omniscience could...
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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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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.
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...if sometimes we are bogged down in lines full of 'corybulous', 'hypogeum', 'plangent', 'irrefragably', 'glozening', 'tellurian', 'conclamant', sometimes we are caught up in the soaring rapture of something unprecedented, absolutely individual.
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A good religious poem, today, is ambergris, and it is hard to enjoy it for thinking of all those suffering whales; but martyrs are born, not made.
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...a poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it...
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When you call people we you find it easy to be unfair to them, since you yourself are included in the condemnation.
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...our quarrels with the world are like our quarrels with God: no matter how right we are, we are wrong.
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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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Critics disagree about almost every quality of a writer’s work; and when some agree about a quality, they disagree about whether it is to be praised or blamed, nurtured or rooted out. After enough criticism the writer is covered with lipstick and bruises, and the two are surprisingly evenly distributed.
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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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As Blake said, there is no competition between true poets.