Randall Jarrell Quotes
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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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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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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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...'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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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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As Blake said, there is no competition between true poets.
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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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...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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...the really damned not only like Hell, they feel loyal to it...
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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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Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise; a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.
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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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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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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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This sort of admission of error, of change, makes us trust a critic as nothing else but omniscience could...
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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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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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I see at last that all the knowledgeI wrung from the darkness - that the darkness flung me -Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darknessAnd we call it wisdom. It is pain.
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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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The weight and concentration of the poems fall upon things (and those great things, animals and people), in their tough, laconic, un-get-pastable plainness: they have kept the stolid and dangerous inertia of the objects of the sagas-the sword that snaps, the man looking at his lopped-off leg and saying, 'That was a good stroke.'
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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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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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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.