Randall Jarrell - Poetry Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

View all Randall Jarrell Quotes
Everybody must have wished at some time that poetry were written by nice ordinary people instead of poets—and, in a better world, it may be; but in this world writers like Constance Carrier are the well oysters that don't have the pearls.

Randall Jarrell
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.

Randall Jarrell
Many young poets, nowadays, are insured against everything. For them poetry is a game like court tennis or squash racquets — one they learned at college — and they play it with propriety, as part of their social and academic existence; their poems are occasional verse for which life itself is only one more occasion.

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
If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Gödel believes Leibnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and systematically converting into poetry what we see and feel and are! When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems — people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensibility, and moral discrimination than most of the poets — it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, "Well, never mind. You're still the only one that can write poetry."

Randall Jarrell
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.

Randall Jarrell
The motto of his [Robinson Jeffers's] work is More! More! —but as Tolstoy says, A wee bit omitted, overemphasized, or exaggerated in poetry, and there is no contagion ; and Frost, bearing him out, says magnificently: A very little of anything goes a long way in a work of art.

Randall Jarrell
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?

Randall Jarrell
What Miss Moore's best poetry does, I can say best in her words: it comes into and steadies the soul, so that the reader feels himself a life prisoner, but reconciled.

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

Randall Jarrell
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.

Randall Jarrell
One is forced to remember how far from "self-expression" great poems are — what a strange compromise between the demands of the self, the world, and Poetry they actually represent.

Randall Jarrell
... progress, in poetry at least, comes not so much from digesting the last age as from rejecting it altogether (or, rather, from eating a little and leaving a lot), and... the world's dialectic is a sort of neo-Hegelian one in which one progresses not by resolving contradictions but by ignoring them.

Randall Jarrell
She said to Constance, parodying a line of poetry that attracted her, "In the United States, there one feels free." But she spoiled it by continuing, "Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster."

Randall Jarrell
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.

Randall Jarrell
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 other refuges of the indigent.

Randall Jarrell
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.

Randall Jarrell
... modern poetry is necessarily obscure; if the reader can't get it, let him eat Browning...

Randall Jarrell