Randall Jarrell - Read Quotes

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One of our universities recently made a survey of the reading habits of the American public; it decided that forty-eight percent of all Americans read, during a year, no book at all. I picture to myself that reader — that non-reader, rather; one man out of every two — and I reflect, with shame: "Our poems are too hard for him." But so, too, are Treasure Island, Peter Rabbit, pornographic novels — any book whatsoever.

Randall Jarrell
The writer does not get from his work as he writes and reads it the same aesthetic shock that the reader does; and since the writer is so accustomed to reading other stories, and having them produce a decided effect upon him, he is disquieted at not being equally affected by his own.

Randall Jarrell
The Author to the Reader
I've read that Luther said (it's come to me
So often that I've made it into meter):
And even if the world should end tomorrow
I still would plant my little apple-tree.
Here, reader, is my little apple-tree.

Randall Jarrell
I have trouble knowing what to do at parties. Prisoners tame mice, or make rings out of spoons: I analyze people's handwriting... or else ask you to tell me what you read when you were a child. (People speak unusually well of the books of their childhood, don't they? Or is this one more life-giving illusion?) I love to see a hard eye grow soft over Little Women... And, I've found, there's no children's book so bad that I mind your having liked it: about the tastes of dead children there is no disputing.

Randall Jarrell
New Directions is a reviewer's nightmare; it's enough punishment to read it all, without writing about it too.

Randall Jarrell
One thinks with awe and longing of this real and extraordinary popularity of hers [Edna St. Vincent Millay's]: if there were some poet—Frost, Stevens, Eliot—whom people still read in canoes!

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
... 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
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
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
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 Statrue of Liberty, is an equal mark of that want of imagination, that inaccessibily to experience, of which each of us who dies a natural death will die.

Randall Jarrell
A few weeks ago I read, in Sacheverell Sitwell, two impressives sentences: It is my belief that I have informed myself of nearly all works of art in the known world.... I have heard most of the music of the world, and seen nearly all the paintings. It was hard for me to believe these sentences, but I wanted Sitwell to be able to say them, liked him for having said them—I believed.

Randall Jarrell
When we think of the masterpieces that nobody praised and nobody read, back there in the past, we feel an impatient superiority to the readers of the past. If we had been there, we can't help feeling, we'd have known that Moby-Dick was a good book—why, how could anyone help knowing?
But suppose someone says to us, Well, you're here now: what's our own Moby-Dick? What's the book that, a hundred years from now, everybody will look down on us for not having liked? What do we say then?

Randall Jarrell
The work of art is as done as it will ever get, and all the critics in the world can't make its crust a bit browner; they may help us, the indigent readers, but they haven't done a thing to it. Around the throne of God, where all the angels read perfectly, there are no critics – there is no need for them.

Randall Jarrell
When we read what Goethe says about men we are ashamed of what we have said; when we read what he says about painting and statues we are ashamed of what Goethe has said.

Randall Jarrell
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.

Randall Jarrell
... girls who had read Wittgenstein as high school baby-sitters were rejected because the school's quota of abnormally intelligent students had already been filled that year.

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
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.

Randall Jarrell
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.

Randall Jarrell