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Randall Jarrell

206 quotes

“A great revolution is hardest of all on the great revolutionists.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A few weeks ago I read, in Sacheverell Sitwell, two impressive 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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We never step twice into the same Auden. — HERACLITUS”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Auden is able to set up a We (whom he identifies himself with — rejection loves company) in opposition to the enemy They...”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The best of causes ruins as quickly as the worst; and the road to Limbo is paved with writers who have done everything — I am being sympathetic, not satiric — for the very best reasons.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...modern poetry is necessarily obscure; if the reader can’t get it, let him eat Browning...”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What we are most anxious about is our anxiety itself: the greatest of all sins, Auden learns from Kafka, is impatience — and he decides that the hero “is, in fact, one who is not anxious.” But it was inevitable that Auden should arrive at this point. His anxiety is fundamental; and the one thing that anxiety cannot do is to accept itself, to do nothing about itself — consequently it admires more than anything else in the world doing nothing, sitting still, waiting.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Many a writer has spent his life putting his favorite words in all the places they belong; but how many, like [E.E.] Cummings, have spent their lives putting their favorite words in all the places they don’t belong, thus discovering many effects that no one had even realized were possible?”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The round-square may be impossible, but we believe in it because it is impossible. [E.E.] Cummings is a very great expert in all these, so to speak, illegal syntactical devices: his misuse of parts of speech, his use of negative prefixes, his word-coining, his systematic relation of words that grammar and syntax don’t permit us to relate — all this makes him a magical bootlegger or moonshiner of language, one who intoxicates us on a clear liquor no government has legalized with its stamp.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...if sometimes we are bogged down in lines full of “corybulous”, “hypogeum”, “plangent”, “irrefragably”, “glozening”, “tellurian”, “conclamant”, sometimes we are caught up in the soaring rapture of something unprecedented, absolutely individual.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Both in verse and in prose [Karl] Shapiro loves, partly out of indignation and partly out of sheer mischievousness, to tell the naked truths or half-truths or quarter-truths that will make anybody’s hair stand on end; he is always crying: “But he hasn’t any clothes on!” about an emperor who is half the time surprisingly well-dressed.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most poets, most good poets even, no longer have the heart to write about what is most terrible in the world of the present: the bombs waiting beside the rockets, the hundreds of millions staring into the temporary shelter of their television sets, the decline of the West that seems less a decline than the fall preceding an explosion.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We live in an age which eschews sentimentality as if it were a good deal more than the devil. (Actually, of course, a writer may be just as sentimental in laying undue emphasis on sexual crimes as on dying mothers: sentimental, like scientific, is an adjective that relates to method, not to matter.)”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) first seen 1935 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ten Books," The Southern Review (Autumn 1935), p. 8
“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 (1914–1965) first seen 1935 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ten Books," The Southern Review (Autumn 1935), p. 8
“An author frequently chooses solemn or overwhelming subjects to write about; he is so impressed at writing about Life and Death that he does not notice that he is saying nothing of the slightest importance about either.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) first seen 1935 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ten Books," The Southern Review (Autumn 1935), p. 9
“[Alexander North] Whitehead is supposed to have said of, Bertrand] Russell: “Bertie thinks me muddleheaded and I think Bertie simple-minded.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A poem is sort of an onion of contexts, and you can no more locate any of the important meanings exclusively in a part than you can locate a relation in one of its terms. The signiﬁcance of a part may be greatly modified or even in extreme cases completely reversed by later and larger parts and by the whole.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...“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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...one straggles gracelessly through a wilderness of common sense. It is an experience for which the reader of modern criticism is unprepared: in that jungle through which one wanders, with its misshapen and extravagant and cannibalistic growths, bent double with fruit and tentacles, disquieting with their rank eccentric life, one comes surprisingly on something so palely healthy: a decorous plant, without thorns or flowers, rootless in the thin sand of the drawing room.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[W.H.] Auden has gone in the right direction, and a great deal too far.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The characteristic poetic strategy of our time — refine your singularities — is something Auden has not learned; so his best poems are very peculiarly good, nearly the most interesting poems of our time. When he writes badly, we can afford to be angry at him, and he can afford to laugh at us.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Early in his life Mr. [Ezra] Pound met with strong, continued, and unintelligent opposition. If people keep opposing you when you are right, you think them fools; and after a time, right or wrong, you think them fools simply because they oppose you. Similarly, you write true things or good things, and end by thinking things true or good simply because you write them”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...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 (1914–1965) first seen 1940 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: of not wanting to write a preface for his first volume of verse, The Rage for the Lost Penny (1940); “A Note on Poetry”, p. 47
“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 (1914–1965) first seen 1927 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: transition [sic] was the avant-garde English-language magazine published in Paris 1927–1938; “A Note on Poetry”, p. 48
“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 othe refuges of the indigent.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The poets of the last generation were extremely erudite, but their erudition was of the rather specialized type that passed as currency of the realm in a somewhat literary realm. About Darwin, Marx, Freud and Co., about all characteristically “scientific” or “modern” thinkers most of them concluded regretfully: “If they had not existed, it would not have been necessary to ignore them.” (Or deplore them.)”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In Heaven all reviews will be favorable; here on earth, the publisher realizes, plausibility demands an occasional bad one, some convincing lump in all that leaven, and he accepts it somewhat as a theologian accepts Evil.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise; a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our universities should produce good criticism; they do not — or, at best, they do so only as federal prisons produce counterfeit money: a few hardened prisoners are more or less surreptitiously continuing their real vocations.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...the work of a poet who has a real talent, but not for words.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Marx said that he had stood Hegel on his head; often Mr. [Horace] Gregory has simply stood Pollyana on her head.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Some of Mr. Gregory’s poems have merely appeared in The New Yorker; others are New Yorker poems: the inclusive topicality, the informed and casual smartness, the flat fashionable irony, meaningless because it proceeds from a frame of reference whose amorphous superiority is the most definite thing about it — they are the trademark not simply of a magazine but of a class.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...“originality” is everyone’s aim, and novel techniques are as much prized as new scientific discoveries. [T.S.] Eliot states it with surprising naïveté: “It is exactly as wasteful for a poet to do what has been done already as for a biologist to rediscover Mendel’s discoveries.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Individualism, isolation, alienation. The poet is not only different from society, he is as different as possible from other poets; all this differentness is exploited to the limit — is used as subject matter, even. Each poet develops an elaborate, “personalized”, bureaucratized machinery of effect; refine your singularities is everybody’s maxim.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“New Directions is a reviewer’s nightmare; it’s enough punishment to read it all, without writing about it too.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Compare the saint who, asked what he would do if he had only an hour to live, replied that he would go on with his game of chess, since it was as much worship as anything else he had ever done.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Poetry in War and Peace," Partisan Review (Winter 1945), p. 129
“A good religious poem, today, is ambergris, and it is hard to enjoy it for thinking of all those suffering whales; but martyrs are born, not made.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Poetry in War and Peace," Partisan Review (Winter 1945), p. 133
“Oscar Williams’s new book is pleasanter and a little quieter than his old, which gave the impression of having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source