Randall Jarrell - Poetry and the age (1953)

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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.

Randall Jarrell
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.

Randall Jarrell
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.

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

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
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
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
It is odd how pleasant and sympathetic her poems are, in these days when many a poet had rather walk down children like Mr. Hyde than weep over them like Swinburne, and when many a poem is gruesome occupational therapy for a poet who stays legally innocuous by means of it.

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
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
All his tunk-a-tunks, his hoo-goo-boos — those mannered, manufactured, individual, uninteresting little sound-inventions — how typical they are of the lecture-style of the English philosopher, who makes grunts or odd noises, uses homely illustrations, and quotes day in and day out from Alice, in order to give what he says some appearance of that raw reality it so plainly and essentially lacks. These tootings at the wedding of the soul are fun for the tooter, but get as dreary for the reader as do all the foreign words — a few of these are brilliant, a few more pleasant, and the rest a disaster: one cannot help deploring his too extensive acquaintance with the foreign languages, as Henry James said, of Walt Whitman, to Edith Wharton.

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

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
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
As Blake said, there is no competition between true poets.

Randall Jarrell
Butter not only wouldn't melt in this mouth, it wouldn't go in; one runs away, an urchin in the gutter and glad to be, murmuring: The Queen of Spain has no legs. … One's eyes widen; one sits the poet down in the porch swing, starts to go off to get her a glass of lemonade, and sees her metamorphosed before one's eyes into a new Critique of Practical Reason.., feminine gender...

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

Randall Jarrell
A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.

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
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.

Randall Jarrell
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.)

Randall Jarrell