Randall Jarrell Quotes
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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...habits are happiness of a sort...
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Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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...a poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it...
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W.H. Auden has gone in the right direction, and a great deal too far.
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...whether they write poems or don’t write poems, poets are best.
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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 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.'
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...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.
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...a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it...
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Somewhere there must be Something that's different from everything. All that I've never thought of - think of me!
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A person is a process, one that leads to death...