Randall Jarrell Quotes

189 Sourced Quotes

Since Pharaoh's bits were pushed into the jaws of kings, these dyings—patient or impatient, but dyings—have happened, by the hundreds of millions; they were all wasted. They taught us to kill others and to die ourselves, but never how to live. Who is taught to live by cruelty, suffering, stupidity, and that occupational disease of soldiers, death?

Randall Jarrell
I see at last that all the knowledge I 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 darkness
And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

Randall Jarrell
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.

Randall Jarrell
... 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.

Randall Jarrell
... 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.

Randall Jarrell
A farmer is separated from a farmer
By what farmers have in common: forests,
Those dark things — what the fields were to begin with.
At night a fox comes out of the forest, eats his chickens.
At night the deer come out of the forest, eat his crops.

Randall Jarrell
The poet needs to be deluded about his poems—for who can be sure that it is delusion? In his strongest hours the public hardly exists for the writer; he does what he ought to do, has to do, and if afterwards some Public wishes to come and crown him with laurel crowns, well, let it! if critics wish to tell people all that he isn't, well, let them—he knows what he is. But at night when he can't get to sleep it seems to him that it is what he is, his own particular personal quality, that he is being disliked for. It is this that the future will like him for, if it likes him for anything; but will it like him for anything? The poet's hope is in posterity, but it is a pale hope; and now that posterity itself has become a pale hope...

Randall Jarrell
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.

Randall Jarrell
Be, as you have been, my happiness;
Let me sleep beside you, each night, like a spoon.

Randall Jarrell
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.

Randall Jarrell
That most human and American of presidents—of Americans—Abraham Lincoln, said as a young man: The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read. It's a hard heart, and a dull one, that doesn't go out to that sentence. The man who will make us see what we haven't seen, feel what we haven't felt, understand what we haven't understood—he is our best friend. And if he knows more than we do, that is an invitation to us, not an indictment of us. And it is not an indictment of him, either; it takes all sorts of people to make a world—to make, even, a United States of America.

Randall Jarrell
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.

Randall Jarrell
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.

Randall Jarrell
[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.

Randall Jarrell
... a [literary] style can be a whole way of existing, so that you exist, for the moment, in perfect sympathy with it: you don't read it so much as listen to it as it sweeps you along—fast enough, often, to make you feel a blurred pleasure in your own speed. Often a phrase or sentence has the uncaring unconscious authority—how else could you say it?—that only a real style has.

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

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

Randall Jarrell
... how poet and public stared at each other with righteous indignation, till the poet said, Since you won't read me, I'll make sure you can't —is one of the most complicated and interesting of stories.

Randall Jarrell
Lending a favorite book has its risks; the borrower may not like it. I still don't know a better novel than Crime and Punishment—still, every fourth or fifth borrower returns it unfinished: it depresses him; besides that, he didn't believe it. More borrowers than this return the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past unfinished: they were bored. There is no book you can lend people that all of them will like.

Randall Jarrell
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.

Randall Jarrell
She would have come from Paradise and complained to God that the apple wasn't a winesap at all, but a great big pulpy Washington Delicious; and after the Ark she would have said that there had not been the animals, the spring rains, and the nice long ocean-voyage the prospectus from the travel agency had led her to expect—and that she had been most disappointed at not finding on Mount Ararat Prometheus.

Randall Jarrell
The new masters paint a subject as they please,
And Veronese is prosecuted by the Inquisition
For the dogs playing at the feet of Christ,
The earth is a planet among galaxies.
Later Christ disappears, the dogs disappear: in abstract
Understanding, without adoration, the last master puts
Colors on canvas, a picture of the universe
In which a bright spot somewhere in the corner
Is the small radioactive planet men called Earth.

Randall Jarrell
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.

Randall Jarrell
Gertrude knew better than this, of course, but we all know better than we know better, or act as if we did.

Randall Jarrell
A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry is a standard Oscar Williams production...... the book has the merit of containing a considerably larger selection of Oscar Williams's poems than I have seen in any other anthology. There are nine of his poems — and five of Hardy's. It takes a lot of courage to like your own poetry almost twice as well as Hardy's.

Randall Jarrell
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."

Randall Jarrell
In Stage II guilt is first of all social, liberal, moral guilt—a guilt so general as to seem almost formal. It is we who are responsible, either by commission or—more generally—by omission, for everything from killing off the Tasmanians to burning the books at Alexandria. (You didn't do it? Then you should have stopped them from doing it. You never heard of it? Ignorant as well as evil, eh? You weren't born? You're guilty, I tell you—guilty.)

Randall Jarrell
Who would be such a fool as to make advances to his reader, advances which might end in rejection or, worse still, in acceptance?

Randall Jarrell
[Kenneth Patchen] has a real, but disorganized, self-indulgent, but rather commonplace talent.
This is not Mr. Patchen's opinion of himself. (Nor is it that of William Carlos Williams, who almost invents a new language, a kind of system of emotional nonsense syllables, in his effort to praise Mr. Patchen properly. For instance, Mr. Patchen is a hawk on the grave of John Donne. I should have called him a parrot on the stones of half a cemetery.)

Randall Jarrell
Ruskin says that anyone who expects perfection from a work of art knows nothing of works of art. This is an appealing sentence that, so far as I can see, is not true about a few pictures and statues and pieces of music, short stories and short poems. Whether or not you expect perfection from them, you get it; at least, there is nothing in them that you would want changed. But what Ruskin says is true about novels: anyone who expects perfection from even the greatest novel knows nothing of novels.

Randall Jarrell