Randall Jarrell quotes - page 2

The ways we miss our lives are life. (Randall Jarrell)
A person is a process, one that leads to death... View quote
Randall Jarrell
...our quarrels with the world are like our quarrels with God: no matter how right we are, we are wrong. View quote
Randall Jarrell
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. View quote
Randall Jarrell
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. View quote
Randall Jarrell
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. View quote
Randall Jarrell
[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. View quote
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. View quote
Randall Jarrell
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. View quote
Randall Jarrell
Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence. View quote
Randall Jarrell
One of the most puzzling things about a novel is that "the way it really was” half the time is, and half the time isn't, the way it ought to be in the novel. (Randall Jarrell)
When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in. View quote
Randall Jarrell
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. View quote
Randall Jarrell
If wishes were stories, beggars would read... View quote
Randall Jarrell
The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces. View quote
Randall Jarrell
Few poets have made a more interesting rhetoric out of just fooling around: turning things upside down, looking at them from under the sofa, considering them (and their observer) curiously enough to make the reader protest, "That were to consider it too curiously.”. View quote
Randall Jarrell
Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise; a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks. View quote
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.”. View quote
Randall Jarrell
One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world. View quote
Randall Jarrell
I shook myself; I was dreaming. As I went to bed the words of the eighth-grade class's teacher, when the class got to Evangeline, kept echoing in my ears: "We're coming to a long poem now, boys and girls. Now don't be babies and start counting the pages.” I lay there like a baby, counting the pages over and over, counting the pages. View quote
Randall Jarrell
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)
...a poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it... View quote
Randall Jarrell
...there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it. View quote
Randall Jarrell
Most works of art are, necessarily, bad...; one suffers through the many for the few. View quote
Randall Jarrell
Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so. View quote
Randall Jarrell