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Randall Jarrell

206 quotes

“This sort of admission of error, of change, makes us trust a critic as nothing else but omniscience could...”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Goethe said that the worst thing in art is technical facility accompanied by triteness. Many an artist, like God, has never needed to think twice about anything. His works are the mad scene from Giselle, on ice skates: he weeps, pulls out his hair — holding his wrists like Lifar — and tells you what Life is, all at a gliding forty miles an hour.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What to leave out is the first thing the artist has to decide; a painter who “held the mirror up to nature” would spend his life on the leaves of one landscape. The work of art’s fluctuating and idiosyncratic threshold of attention — the great things disregarded, the small things seized and dwelt on — is as much of a signature as anything in it.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...there is in this world no line so bad that someone won’t someday copy it.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We know from many experiences that this is what the work of art does: its life — in which we have shared the alien existences both of this world and of that different world to which the work of art alone gives us access — unwillingly accuses our lives.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Profession of Poetry," Partisan Review (September/October 1950), p. 166
“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 (1914–1965) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Profession of Poetry," Partisan Review (September/October 1950), p. 168
“It is better to have the child in the chimney corner moved by what happens in the poem, in spite of his ignorance of its real meaning, than to have the poem a puzzle to which that meaning is the only key. Still, complicated subjects make complicated poems, and some of the best poems can move only the best readers; this is one more question of curves of normal distribution. I have tried to make my poems plain, and most of them are plain enough; but I wish that they were more difficult because I had known more.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Answers to Questions," from Mid-Century American Poets, edited by John Ciardi, 1950, p. 170
“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 (1914–1965) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Answers to Questions," from Mid-Century American Poets, edited by John Ciardi, 1950, p. 171
“Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we shall know everything the eighteenth century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) first seen 1953 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the Underside of the Stone," The New York Times Book Review (23 August 1953), p. 177
“...man is the animal that moralizes. Man is also the animal that complains about being one, and says that there is an animal, a beast inside him — that he is brother to dragons. (He is certainly a brother to wolves, and to pandas too, but he is father to dragons, not brother: they, like many gods and devils, are inventions of his.)”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Malraux writes in a language in which there is no way to say "perhaps" or "I don't know," so that after a while we grow accustomed to saying it for him.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) first seen 1953 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Malraux and the Statues at Baumberg," Art News (December 1953), p. 180
“Most works of art are, necessarily, bad...; one suffers through the many for the few.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let’s say this together: “Great me no greats”, and leave this grading to posterity.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...we like somebody who succeeds with such bad conscience, and who seems to wish that he had the nerve to be a failure or, better still, something to which the terms success and failure don’t apply — as when Mallory said, about Everest: “Success is meaningless here.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“First one gets works of art, then criticism of them, then criticism of the criticism, and, finally, a book on The Literary Situation, a book which tells you all about writers, critics, publishing, paperbacked books, the tendencies of the (literary) time, what sells and how much, what writers wear and drink and want, what their wives wear and drink and want, and so on.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But there is a Pope in the breast of each of us whom is hard to silence. Long ago a lady said to me, when I asked her the composers she liked: “Dvorak.” I said before I could stop myself: “Dvorak!” How many times, and with what shame, I’ve remembered it. And now I like Dvorak...”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Recent Poetry”, p. 226”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...whether they write poems or don’t write poems, poets are best.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1914–1965) first seen 1955 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Recent Poetry," The Yale Review (Autumn 1955), p. 231
“Underneath all his writing there is the settled determination to use certain words, to take certain attitudes, to produce a certain atmosphere; what he is seeing or thinking or feeling has hardly any influence on the way he writes. The reader can reply, ironically, "That's what it means to have a style"; but few people have so much of one, or one so obdurate that you can say of it, "It is a style that no subject can change.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) first seen 1955 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Recent Poetry," The Yale Review (Autumn 1955), p. 237
“If you look at the world with parted lips and a pure heart, and will the good, won't that make a true and beautiful poem? One's heart tells one that it will; and one's heart is wrong. There is no direct road to Parnassus.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) first seen 1955 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Recent Poetry," The Yale Review (Autumn 1955), p. 237
“When you call people we you find it easy to be unfair to them, since you yourself are included in the condemnation.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) first seen 1956 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Five Poets," The Yale Review (Autumn 1956), p. 263
“The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Taste of the Age," The Saturday Evening Post (26 July 1958), p. 290
“If we judge by wealth and power, our times are the best of times; if the times have made us willing to judge by wealth and power, they are the worst of times.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Taste of the Age," The Saturday Evening Post (26 July 1958), p. 290
“...a poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it...”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Woman at the Washington Zoo," [an essay about the writing of the poem by that name] from Understanding Poetry, third edition, ed. Cleanth Brooks (1960), p. 319
“You often feel about something in Shakespeare or Dostoevsky that nobody ever said such a thing, but it's just the sort of thing people would say if they could — is more real, in some sense, than what people do say. If you have given your imagination free rein, let things go as far as they want to go, the world they made for themselves while you watched can have, for you and later watchers, a spontaneous finality.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Preparing to Read Kipling," introduction to The Best Short Stories of Rudyard Kipling (1961), p. 335
“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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Robert] 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
“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
“Sometimes it is hard to criticize, one wants only to chronicle. The good and mediocre books come in from week to week, and I put them aside and read them and think of what to say; but the "worthless" books come in day after day, like the cries and truck sounds from the street, and there is nothing that anyone could think of that is good enough for them. In the bad type of thin pamphlets, in hand-set lines on imported paper, people's hard lives and hopeless ambitions have expressed themselves more directly and heartbreakingly than they have ever expressed in any work of art: it is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with "This is a poem" scrawled on them in lipstick. After a while one is embarrassed not so much for them as for poetry, which is for these poor poets one more of the openings against which everyone in the end beats his brains out; and one finds it unbearable that poetry should be so hard to write — a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey in which there is for most of the players no tail, no donkey, not even a booby prize.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Verse Chronicle," The Nation (23 February 1946); reprinted as "Bad Poets" in Poetry and the Age (1953)
“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 (1914–1965) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Verse Chronicle," The Nation (23 February 1946); reprinted as "Bad Poets" in Poetry and the Age (1953)
“When I was asked to talk about the Obscurity of the Modern Poet I was delighted, for I have suffered from this obscurity all my life. But then I realized that I was being asked to talk not about the fact that people don’t read poetry, but about the fact that most of them wouldn’t understand it if they did: about the difficulty, not the neglect, of contemporary poetry. And yet it is not just modern poetry, but poetry, that is today obscure. Paradise Lost is what it was; but the ordinary reader no longer makes the mistake of trying to read it — instead he glances at it, weighs it in his hand, shudders, and suddenly, his eyes shining, puts it on his list of the ten dullest books he has ever read, along with Moby-Dick, War and Peace, Faust, and Boswell’s Life of Johnson. But I am doing this ordinary reader an injustice: it was not the Public, nodding over its lunch-pail, but the educated reader, the reader the universities have trained, who a few weeks ago, to the Public’s sympathetic delight, put together this list of the world’s dullest books. Since most people know about the modern poet only that he is obscure — i.e., that he is difficult, i.e., that he is neglected — they naturally make a causal connection between the two meanings of the word, and decide that he is unread because he is difficult. Some of the time this is true: the poet seems difficult because he is not read, because the reader is not accustomed to reading his or any other poetry.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This poet is now, most of the time, an elder statesman like Baruch or Smuts, full of complacent wisdom and cast-iron whimsy. But of course there was always a good deal of this in the official rôle that Frost created for himself; one imagines Yeats saying about Frost, as Sarah Bernhardt said about Nijinsky: “I fear, I greatly fear, that I have just seen the greatest actor in the world.” Sometimes it is this public figure, this official rôle — the Only Genuine Robert Frost in Captivity — that writes the poems, and not the poet himself; and then one gets a self-made man’s political editorials, full of cracker-box philosophizing, almanac joke-cracking — of a snake-oil salesman’s mysticism; one gets the public figure’s relishing consciousness of himself, an astonishing constriction of imagination and sympathy; one gets sentimentality and whimsicality; an arch complacency, a complacent archness; and one gets Homely Wisdom till the cows come home.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How necessary it is to think of the poet as somebody who has prepared himself to be visited by a dæmon, as a sort of accident-prone worker to whom poems happen — for otherwise we expect him to go on writing good poems, better poems, and this is the one thing you cannot expect even of good poets, much less of anybody else. Good painters in their sixties may produce good pictures as regularly as an orchard produces apples; but Planck is a great scientist because he made one discovery as a young man — and I can remember reading in a mathematician’s memoirs a sentence composedly recognizing the fact that, since the writer was now past forty, he was unlikely ever again to do any important creative work in mathematics. A man who is a good poet at forty may turn out to be a good poet at sixty; but he is more likely to have stopped writing poems, to be doing exercises in his own manner, or to have reverted to whatever commonplaces were popular when he was young. 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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Robert Lowell] is a poet of both Will and Imagination, but his Will is always seizing his Imagination by the shoulders and saying to it in a grating voice: “Don’t sit there fooling around; get to work!” — and his poor Imagination gets tense all over and begins to revolve determinedly and familiarly, like a squirrel in a squirrel-cage. Goethe talked about the half-somnambulistic state of the poet; but Mr. Lowell too often is either having a nightmare or else is wide awake gritting his teeth and working away at All The Things He Does Best. Cocteau said to poets: Learn what you can do and then don’t do it; and this is so — we do it enough without trying. As a poet Mr. Lowell sometimes doesn’t have enough trust in God and tries to do everything himself: he proposes and disposes — and this helps to give a certain monotony to his work.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Benton had been endowed with one to begin with, and had smiled and sweated and and spoken for the other. A visitor looked under black beams, through leaded casements (past apple boughs, past box, past chairs like bath-tubs on broomsticks) to a lawn ornamented with one of the statues of David Smith; in the months since the figure had been put in its place a shrike had deserted for it a neighboring thorn tree, and an archer had skinned her leg against its farthest spike. On the table in the President’s waiting-room there were copies of Town and Country, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and a small magazine — a little magazine — that had no name. One walked by a mahogany hat-rack, glanced at the coat of arms on an umbrella-stand, and brushed with one’s sleeve something that gave a ghostly tinkle — four or five black and orange ellipsoids, set on grey wires, trembled in the faint breeze of the air-conditioning unit: a mobile. A cloud passed over the sun, and there came trailing from the gymnasium, in maillots and blue jeans, a melancholy procession, four dancers helping to the infirmary a friend who had dislocated her shoulder in the final variation of The Eye of Anguish.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...and then President Robbins began to speak. After two sentences one realized once more that President Robbins was an extraordinary speaker, a speaker of a — one says an almost extinct school, but how does one say the opposite? a not-yet-evolved school? He did something so logical that it is impossibe that no one else should have thought of it, yet no one has. President Robbins crooned his speeches. His voice not only took you into his confidence, it laid a fire for you and put your slippers by it and then went into the other room to get into something more comfortable. It was a Compromising voice.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He loved hitherto-unthought-of, thereafter-unthinkable combinations of instruments. When some extraordinary array of players filed half-proudly, half-sheepishly on to the stage, looking like the Bremen Town Musicians — if those were, as I think they were, a rooster, a cat, a dog, and a donkey — you could guess beforehand that it was to be one of Gottfried’s compositions. His Joyous Celebration of the Memory of the Master Johann Sebastian Bach had a tone-row composed of the notes B, A, C, and H (in the German notation), of these inverted, and of these transposed; and there were four movements, the first played on instruments beginning with the letter b, the second on instruments beginning with the letter a, and so on. After the magnificent group that ushered in the piece (bugle, bass-viol, bassoon, basset-horn, bombardon, bass-drum, baritone, and a violinist with only his bow) it was sad to see an Alp horn and an accordion come in to play the second movement. Gottfriend himself said about the first group: “Vot a bunch!” When I asked him how he had thought of it he said placidly: “De devil soldt me his soul.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Once, along with The Transfigured Night, he played a class Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead. Most of the class had not seen the painting, so he went to the library and returned with a reproduction of it. Then he pointed, with a sober smile, to a painting which hung on the wall of the classroom (A Representation of Several Areas, Some of Them Grey, one might have called it; yet this would have been unjust to it — it was non-representational) and played for the class, on the piano, a composition which he said was an interpretation of the painting: he played very slowly and very calmly, with his elbows, so that it sounded like blocks falling downstairs, but in slow motion. But half his class took this as seriously as they took everything else, and asked him for weeks afterward about prepared pianos, tone-clusters, and the compositions of John Cage and Henry Cowell; one girl finally brought him a lovely silk-screen reproduction of a painting by Jackson Pollock, and was just opening her mouth to — He interrupted, bewilderingly, by asking the Lord what land He had brought him into. The girl stared at him open-mouthed, and he at once said apologetically that he was only quoting Mahler, who had also diedt from America; then he gave her such a winning smile that she said to her roommate that night, forgivingly: “He really is a nice old guy. You never would know he’s famous.” “Is he really famous?” her roommate asked. “I never heard of him before I got here. ...”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When we look at the age in which we live — no matter what age it happens to be — it is hard for us not to be depressed by it. The taste of the age is, always, a bitter one. “What kind of a time is this when one must envy the dead and buried!” said Goethe about his age; yet Matthew Arnold would have traded his own time for Goethe’s almost as willingly as he would have traded his own self for Goethe’s. How often, after a long day witnessing elementary education, School Inspector Arnold came home, sank into what I hope was a Morris chair, looked ’round him at the Age of Victoria, that Indian Summer of the Western World, and gave way to a wistful, exacting, articulate despair! Do people feel this way because our time is worse than Arnold’s, and Arnold’s than Goethe’s, and so on back to Paradise? Or because forbidden fruits — the fruits forbidden to us by time — are always the sweetest? Or because we can never compare our own age with an earlier age, but only with books about that age? We say that somebody doesn’t know what he is missing; Arnold, pretty plainly, didn’t know what he was having. The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks. Maybe we too are living in a Golden or, anyway, Gold-Plated Age, and the people of the future will look back at us and say ruefully: “We never had it so good.” And yet the thought that they will say this isn’t as reassuring as it might be. We can see that Goethe’s and Arnold’s ages weren’t as bad as Goethe and Arnold thought them: after all, they produced Goethe and Arnold. In the same way, our times may not be as bad as we think them: after all, they have produced us. Yet this too is a thought that isn’t as reassuring as it might be.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our society, it turns out, can use modern art. A restaurant, today, will order a mural by Míro in as easy and matter-of-fact a spirit as, twenty-five years ago, it would have ordered one by Maxfield Parrish. The president of a paint factory goes home, sits down by his fireplace — it looks like a chromium aquarium set into the wall by a wall-safe company that has branched out into interior decorating, but there is a log burning in it, he calls it a fireplace, let’s call it a fireplace too — the president sits down, folds his hands on his stomach, and stares at two paintings by Jackson Pollock that he has hung on the wall opposite him. He feels at home with them; in fact, as he looks at them he not only feels at home, he feels as if he were back at the paint factory. And his children — if he has any — his children cry for Calder. He uses thoroughly advanced, wholly non-representational artists to design murals, posters, institutional advertisements: if we have the patience (or are given the opportunity) to wait until the West has declined a little longer, we shall all see the advertisements of Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, and Smith illustrated by Jean Dubuffet. This president’s minor executives may not be willing to hang a Kandinsky in the house, but they will wear one, if you make it into a sport shirt or a pair of swimming-trunks; and if you make it into a sofa, they will lie on it. They and their wives and children will sit on a porcupine, if you first exhibit it at the Museum of Modern Art and say that it is a chair. In fact, there is nothing, nothing in the whole world that someone won’t buy and sit in if you tell him it is a chair: the great new art form of our age, the one that will take anything we put in it, is the chair. If Hieronymus Bosch, if Christian Morgenstern, if the Marquis de Sade were living at this hour, what chairs they would be designing!”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The greatest American industry — why has no one ever said so? — is the industry of using words. We pay tens of millions of people to spend their lives lying to us, or telling us the truth, or supplying us with a nourishing medicinal compound of the two. All of us are living in the middle of a dark wood — a bright Technicolored forest — of words, words, words. It is a forest in which the wind is never still: there isn’t a tree in the forest that is not, for every moment of its life and our lives, persuading or ordering or seducing or overawing us into buying this, believing that, voting for the other.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The poet needs to be deluded about his poems — for who can be sure that it is delusion? In his strongest hours the public hardly exists for the writer; he does what he ought to do, has to do, and if afterwards some Public wishes to come and crown him with laurel crowns, well, let it! if critics wish to tell people all that he isn’t, well, let them — he knows what he is. But at night when he can’t get to sleep it seems to him that it is what he is, his own particular personal quality, that he is being disliked for. It is this that the future will like him for, if it likes him for anything; but will it like him for anything? The poet’s hope is in posterity, but it is a pale hope; and now that posterity itself has become a pale hope...”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A few months ago I read an interview with a critic; a well-known critic; an unusually humane and intelligent critic. The interviewer had just said that the critic “sounded like a happy man”, and the interview was drawing to a close; the critic said, ending it all: “I read, but I don’t get any time to read at whim. All the reading I do is in order to write or teach, and I resent it. We have no TV, and I don’t listen to the radio or records, or go to art galleries or the theater. I’m a completely negative personality.” As I thought of that busy, artless life — no records, no paintings, no plays, no books except those you lecture on or write articles about — I was so depressed that I went back over the interview looking for some bright spot, and I found it, one beautiful sentence: for a moment I had left the gray, dutiful world of the professional critic, and was back in the sunlight and shadow, the unconsidered joys, the unreasoned sorrows, of ordinary readers and writers, amateurishly reading and writing “at whim”. The critic said that once a year he read Kim, it was plain, at whim: not to teach, not to criticize, just for love — he read it, as Kipling wrote it, just because he liked to, wanted to, couldn’t help himself. To him it wasn’t a means to a lecture or an article, it was an end; he read it not for anything he could get out of it, but for itself. And isn’t this what the work of art demands of us? The work of art, Rilke said, says to us always: You must change your life. It demands of us that we too see things as ends, not as means — that we too know them and love them for their own sake. This change is beyond us, perhaps, during the active, greedy, and powerful hours of our lives, but during the contemplative and sympathetic hours of our reading, our listening, our looking, it is surely within our power, if we choose to make it so, if we choose to let one part of our nature follow its natural desires. So I say to you, for a closing sentence: Read at whim! read at whim!”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A man on a park bench has a lonely final look, as if to say: “Reduce humanity to its ultimate particles and you end here; beyond this single separate being you cannot go.” But if you look back into his life you cannot help seeing that he is separated off, not separate — is a later, singular stage of an earlier plural being. All the tongues of men were baby talk to begin with: go back far enough and which of us knew where he ended and Mother and Father and Brother and Sister began? The singular subject in its objective universe has evolved from that orginal composite entity — half subjective, half objective, having its own ways and laws and language, its own life and its own death — the family.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. The child has not yet had the chance to know what it is like to be a grownup; he believes, even, that being a grownup is a mistake he will never make — when he grows up he will keep on being a child, a big child with power. So the child and grownup live in mutual love, misunderstanding, and distaste. Children shout and play and cry and want candy; grownups say Ssh! and work and scold and want steak. There is no disputing tastes as contradictory as these. It is not just Mowgli who was raised by a couple of wolves; any child is raised by a couple of grownups. Father and Mother may be nearer and dearer than anyone will ever be again — still, they are members of a different species. God is, I suppose, what our parents were; certainly the ogre of the stories is so huge, so powerful, and so stupid because that is the way a grownup looks to a child. Grownups forget or cannot believe that they seem even more unreasonable to children than children seem to them.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source