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Randall Jarrell

206 quotes

• “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.”

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Obscurity of the Poet," Harvard University lecture (15 August 1950) delivered at the Harvard University Summer School Conference on the Defense of Poetry (August 14-17, 1950); reprinted in Partisan Review, XVIII (Ja…

• “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 (1914–1965) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Obscurity of the Poet," Harvard University lecture (15 August 1950), published in Poetry and the Age (1953)

• “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 (1914–1965) first seen 1955 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Intellectual in America" (1955), from A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1962)

• “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.”

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: A Sad Heart at the Supermarket," Daedalus, vol. 89, no. 2 (Spring 1960); published in A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1962)

• “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.”

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) first seen 1965 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: An Unread Book," introduction to The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead (Holt, Rinehart, 1965 edition)

• “Delmore carries such a petty, personally involved, New Yorkish atmosphere around with him it's almost unpleasant for me to see him. He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors.”

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) first seen 1952 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Quoted in Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "Books of the Times," The New York Times (6 May 1985) . The quote is cited from a 1952 letter in Randall Jarrell's Letters: An Autobiographical and Literary Selection, ed. Mary Jarre…

• “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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: As quoted in Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Times (1993) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 391

• “I see at last that all the knowledgeI 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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The nurse is the night To wake to, to die in: and the day I live, The world and its life are her dreams.”

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 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.”

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “For this last savior, man, I have lied as I lie now. But what is lying? Men wash their hands in blood, as best they can: I find no fault in this just man.”

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The soul has no assignments, neither cooks Nor referees: it wastes its time. It wastes its time. Here in this enclave there are centuries For you to waste: the short and narrow stream Of life meanders into a thousand valleys Of all that was, or might have been, or is to be. The books, just leafed through, whisper endlessly.”

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The ways we miss our lives are life.”

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Somewhere there must be Something that's different from everything. All that I've never thought of — think of me!”

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “His eye a ring inside a ring inside a ring That leers up, joyless, vile, in meek obscenity — This is the devil. Flesh to flesh, he bleats The herd back to the pit of being.”

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Death and the devil, what are these to him? His being accuses him — and yet his face is firm In resolution, in absolute persistence; The folds of smiling do for steadiness; The face is its own fate — a man does what he must — And the body underneath it says: I am.”

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “People always ask: For whom does the poet write? He needs only to answer, For whom do you do good? Are you kind to your daughter because in the end someone will pay you for being?... The poet writes his poem for its own sake, for the sake of that order of things in which the poem takes the place that has awaited it.”

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1914–1965) first seen 1951 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Reflections on Wallace Stevens”, p. 127, originally in Partisan Review, Vol. 18, (May/June 1951)

• “When you’re young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.”

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “It is G.E. Moore at the spinet.”

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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?”

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Mrs. Robbins asked: “If I am not for myself, who then is for me?” — and she was for herself so passionately that the other people in the world decided that they were not going to let Pamela Robbins beat them at her own game, and stopped playing.”

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “...to Americans English manners are far more frightening than none at all...”

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Gertrude Johnson could feel no real respect for, no real interest in, anybody who wasn't a writer. For her there were two species: writers and people; and the writers were really people, and the people weren't.”

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “...the really damned not only like Hell, they feel loyal to it...”

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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