Randall Jarrell Quotations

The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.

One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups, to a child, is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

The blind date that has stood you up: your life.

It is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life

I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine- tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry

In the United States, there one feels free... Except from the Americans - but every pearl has its oyster.

To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all.

If we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a hundred, we say they aren't like politicians at all, and our category of politicians stays unchanged; we know what politicians are like.

He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors.

I decided that Europeans and Americans are like men and women: they understand each other worse, and it matters less, than either of them suppose.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner. From my mother's sleep, I fell into the State, and I hunched in its belly until my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

The Southern past, the Southern present, the Southern future became one of red clay pine barrens, of chain-gang camps, of housewives dressed in flour sacks who stare all day dully down into dirty sinks.

President Robbins was so well adjusted to his environment that sometimes you could not tell which was the environment and which was President Robbins.

In the United States, there one feels free . . . Except from the Americans - but every pearl has its oyster.

We are all so to speak intellectuals about something.

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.

Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.

If you look at the world with parted lips and a pure heart, and will the good, won't that make a true and beautiful poem? One's heart tells one that it will; and one's heart is wrong. There is no direct road to Parnassus .

An author frequently chooses solemn or overwhelming subjects to write about; he is so impressed at writing about Life and Death that he does not notice that he is saying nothing of the slightest importance about either.

There are some good things and some fantastic ones in Auden's early attitude; if the reader calls it a muddle I shall acquiesce, with the remark that the later position might be considered a more rarefied muddle. But poets rather specialize in muddles and I have no doubt which of the muddles was better for Auden's poetry: one was fertile and usable, the other decidedly is not. Auden sometimes seems to be saying with Henry Clay, "I had rather be right than poetry"; but I am not sure, then, that he is either.

Christina Stead has a Chinese say, "Our old age is perhaps life's decision about us" or, worse, the decision we have made about ourselves without ever realizing we were making it.

Most people don't listen to classical music at all, but to rock-and-roll or hillbilly songs or some album named Music To Listen To Music By...

Kenneth Burke calls form the satisfaction of an expectation; The Man Who Loved Children is full of such satisfactions, but it has a good deal of the deliberate disappointment of an expectation that is also form.

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.

Modern" poetry is, essentially, an extension of romanticism; it is what romantic poetry wishes or finds it necessary to become. It is the end product of romanticism, all past and no future; it is impossible to go further by any extrapolation of the process by which we have arrived, and certainly it is impossible to remain where we are who could endure a century of transition ?

Imagism was a reductio ad absurdum of one or two tendencies of romanticism, such a beautifully and finally absurd one that it is hard to believe it existed as anything but a logical construction; and what imagist found it possible to go on writing imagist poetry? A number of poets have stopped writing entirely; others, like recurring decimals, repeat the novelties they commeced with, each time less valuably than before. And there are surrealist poetry, and political poetry, and all the othe refuges of the indigent.

when General Eisenhower defined an intellectual as "a man who takes more words than is necessary to tell more than he knows", he was speaking not as a Republican but as an American.

If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help.

Most works of art are, necessarily, bad...; one suffers through the many for the few.

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.

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.

A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry.

People had always seemed to Gertrude rather like the beasts in Animal Farm : all equally detestable, but some more equally detestable than others...

The Southern past, the Southern present, the Southern future, concentrated into Gertrude's voice, became one of red clay pine-barrens, of chain-gang camps, of housewives dressed in flour sacks who stare all day dully down into dirty sinks.

When you call people we you find it easy to be unfair to them, since you yourself are included in the condemnation.

[Robert] Frost says in a piece of homely doggerel that he has hoped wisdom could be not only Attic but Laconic, Boeotian even "at least not systematic"; but how systematically Frostian the worst of his later poems are! His good poems are the best refutation of, the most damning comment on, his bad: his Complete Poems have the air of being able to educate any faithful reader into tearing out a third of the pages, reading a third, and practically wearing out the rest.

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.

When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.

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?

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.

One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.

Poetry is a bad medium for philosophy. Everything in the philosophical poem has to satisfy irreconcilable requirements: for instance, the last demand that we should make of philosophy (that it be interesting) is the first we make of a poem; the philosophical poet has an elevated and methodical, but forlorn and absurd air as he works away at his flying tank, his sewing-machine that also plays the piano.

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.

If you never look just wrong to your contemporaries you will never look just right to posterity every writer has to try to be, to some extent, sometimes, a law unto himself.

Underneath all his writing there is the settled determination to use certain words, to take certain attitudes, to produce a certain atmosphere; what he is seeing or thinking or feeling has hardly any influence on the way he writes. The reader can reply, ironically, "That's what it means to have a style"; but few people have so much of one, or one so obdurate that you can say of it, "It is a style that no subject can change.

We read our mail and counted up our missions In bombers named for girls, we burned The cities we had learned about in school Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among The people we had killed and never seen. When we lasted long enough they gave us medals; When we died they said, "Our casualties were low." They said, "Here are the maps"; we burned the cities.

Nowadays when a poet with one privately printed book can have his next three years taken care of by a Guggenheim fellowship, a Kenyon Review fellowship, and the Prix de Rome, it is hard to remember what chances the poet took in that small-town world, how precariously hand-to-mouth his existence was. And yet in one way the old days were better; [Vachel] Lindsay after a while, by luck and skill, got far more readers than any poet could get today.

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.

whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.

a poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it...

First one gets works of art, then criticism of them, then criticism of the criticism, and, finally, a book on The Literary Situation , a book which tells you all about writers, critics, publishing, paperbacked books, the tendencies of the (literary) time, what sells and how much, what writers wear and drink and want, what their wives wear and drink and want, and so on.

there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.

Anyone who has read Yeats's wonderful Autobiography will remember his Sligo shabby, shadowed, half country and half sea, full of confused romance, superstition, poverty, eccentricity, unrecognized anachronism, passion and ignorance and the little boy's misery. Yeats was treated well but was bitterly unhappy; he prayed that he would die, and used often to say to himself: "When you are grown up, never talk as grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood.

Few poets have made a more interesting rhetoric out of just fooling around: turning things upside down, looking at them from under the sofa, considering them (and their observer) curiously enough to make the reader protest, "That were to consider it too curiously.

The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces.

We always tend to distrust geniuses about genius, as if what they say didn't arouse much empathy in us, or as if we were waiting till some more reliable source of information came along...

An intelligent man said that the world felt Napoleon as a weight, and that when he died it would give a great oof of relief. This is just as true of Byron, or of such Byrons of their days as Kipling and Hemingway: after a generation or two the world is tired of being their pedestal, shakes them of with an oof, and then hoisting onto its back a new world-figure feels the penetrating satisfaction of having made a mistake all its own.

I don't need to praise anything so justly famous as Frost 's observation of and empathy with everything in Nature from a hornet to a hillside; and he has observed his own nature, one person's random or consequential chains of thoughts and feelings and perceptions, quite as well. (And this person, in the poems, is not the "alienated artist" cut off from everybody who isn't, yum-yum, another alienated artist; he is someone like normal people only more so a normal person in the less common and more important sense of normal .

Pain comes from the darkness. And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

Doesn't the world need the painter's praise anymore?

I think Miss Moore was right to cut "The Steeple-Jack" the poem seems plainer and clearer in its shortened state but she has cut too much... The reader may feel like saying, "Let her do as she pleases with the poem; it's hers, isn't it?" No; it's much too good a poem for that, it long ago became everybody's, and we can protest just as we could if Donatello cut off David's left leg.

A person is a process, one that leads to death...

Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?

And the world said, Child, you will not be missed. You are cheaper than a wrench, your back is a road; Your death is a table in a book. You had our wit, our heart was sealed to you: Man is the judgment of the world.

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.

Many poets...write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.

Age could not wither nor custom stale her infinite monotony: in fact, neither Age nor Custom could do anything (as they said, their voices rising) with the American novelist Gertrude Johnson.

Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen.

The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.

The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

The safest way to avoid the world is through art; and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art.

I see at last that all the knowledge I wrung from the darkness - that darkness flung me - Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

It is better to entertain an idea than to take home to live with you for the rest of your life.

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Art is long, and critics are the insects of a day.

Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.

our quarrels with the world are like our quarrels with God: no matter how right we are, we are wrong.

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.

The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.

More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader, and would no more read a book alone, if they could help it, than have a baby alone.

habits are happiness of a sort...

Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so.

If wishes were stories, beggars would read...

I simply don't want the poems mixed up with my life or opinions or picture or any other regrettable concomitants. I look like a bear and live in a cave; but you should worry.

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.

When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own; but to accept it because its stews taste exactly like your old mother's hash, or to reject it because the owl-headed goddess of wisdom in its temple is fatter than the Statue of Liberty, is an equal mark of that want of imagination, that inaccessibility to experience, of which each of us who dies a natural death will die.

Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise; a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.

A correct answer is like an affectionate kiss, Goethe said; a correct answer, Gertrude would have said, is like a slap in the face.

One of the most puzzling things about a novel is that "the way it really was" half the time is, and half the time isn't, the way it ought to be in the novel.

The best of causes ruins as quickly as the worst; and the road to Limbo is paved with writers who have done everything I am being sympathetic, not satiric for the very best reasons.

You give me the feeling that the universe Was made by something more than human For something less than human. But I identify myself, as always, With something that there's something wrong with, With something human.

Early in his life Mr. [Ezra] Pound met with strong, continued, and unintelligent opposition. If people keep opposing you when you are right, you think them fools; and after a time, right or wrong, you think them fools simply because they oppose you. Similarly, you write true things or good things, and end by thinking things true or good simply because you write them

Some of Mr. Gregory's poems have merely appeared in The New Yorker ; others are New Yorker poems: the inclusive topicality, the informed and casual smartness, the flat fashionable irony, meaningless because it proceeds from a frame of reference whose amorphous superiority is the most definite thing about it they are the trademark not simply of a magazine but of a class.

originality" is everyone's aim, and novel techniques are as much prized as new scientific discoveries. [T.S.] Eliot states it with surprising naïveté: "It is exactly as wasteful for a poet to do what has been done already as for a biologist to rediscover Mendel's discoveries.

Goethe said that the worst thing in art is technical facility accompanied by triteness. Many an artist, like God, has never needed to think twice about anything. His works are the mad scene from Giselle , on ice skates: he weeps, pulls out his hair holding his wrists like Lifar and tells you what Life is, all at a gliding forty miles an hour.

We died like aunts of pets or foreigners.

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.

If you've been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place.

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.