Randall Jarrell Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
When you’re young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
-
Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
-
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.
-
...modern poetry is necessarily obscure; if the reader can’t get it, let him eat Browning...
-
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...
-
...a poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it...
-
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.
-
...habits are happiness of a sort...
-
His eye a ring inside a ring inside a ring That leers up, joyless, vile, in meek obscenity - This is the devil. Flesh to flesh, he bleatsThe herd back to the pit of being.
-
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.
-
I shook myself; I was dreaming. As I went to bed the words of the eighth-grade class’s teacher, when the class got to Evangeline, kept echoing in my ears: 'We’re coming to a long poem now, boys and girls. Now don’t be babies and start counting the pages.' I lay there like a baby, counting the pages over and over, counting the pages.
-
Our universities should produce good criticism; they do not-or, at best, they do so only as federal prisons produce counterfeit money: a few hardened prisoners are more or less surreptitiously continuing their real vocations.
-
W.H. Auden has gone in the right direction, and a great deal too far.
-
...we are willing to admit the normality of the abnormal-are willing to admit that we never understood the normal better than when it has been allowed to reach its full growth and become the abnormal.
-
...whether they write poems or don’t write poems, poets are best.
-
...a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it...
-
If my tone is mocking, the tone of someone accustomed to helplessness, this is natural: the poet is a condemned man for whom the State will not even buy breakfast - and as someone said, 'If you’re going to hang me, you mustn’t expect to be able to intimidate me into sparing your feelings during the execution.'
-
A person is a process, one that leads to death...