Randall Jarrell Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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...whether they write poems or don’t write poems, poets are best.
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We are all-so to speak-intellectuals about something.
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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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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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A person is a process, one that leads to death...
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When you’re young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
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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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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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...habits are happiness of a sort...
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President Robbins was so well adjusted to his environment that sometimes you could not tell which was the environment and which was President Robbins.
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...there is in this world no line so bad that someone won’t someday copy it.
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We were given drinks, and drank them, and talked while we drank them. But talked, here, is a euphemism: we had that conversation about how you make a Martini. The people in Hell, Dr. Rosenbaum had told me once, say nothing but What? Americans in Hell tell each other how to make Martinis.
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W.H. Auden has gone in the right direction, and a great deal too far.