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Randall Jarrell

Randall Jarrell Quotes

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Famous Randall Jarrell Quotes

“She helped the hunter with the cooking as a husband helps his wife: when he had gone out to hunt and left something to stew, she would take the pot off the fire. But she never knew when to take it off; sometimes it was cooked to pieces, and she never got it right except by accident. But when the accident happened the hunter would laugh and say, "You're as good a cook as my mother!" After all, why should he want her to keep house? If you have a seal that could talk, would you want it to sweep the floor?”

CookingHousekeepingHusbands And Wives
Book:The Animal Family
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“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.”

IfsThinkingFeelsMayLongStatesSeemsLeftToo MuchCuttingMissingReaderPleaseLegsProtestLong AgoSteeplesDonatello
Author:Randall Jarrell
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“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.”

LongDreamGirlClassBoysTeacherBabyBedPagesEarsLaysGradesCountingBoy And GirlEighth Grade
Book:A sad heart at the supermarket: essays & fables
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“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.”

WorldWritingHeartSeemsFallWaitingMillionsTelevisionPoetTerribleWestStaringBombsTemporaryDeclineShelterExplosionsRockets
Author:Randall Jarrell
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“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”

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Author:Randall Jarrell
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“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.”

ClassMagazinesIronyFlatsMeaninglessDefiniteSuperiorityCasualFashionableNew YorkersTrademarksSmartnessFrame Of Reference
Author:Randall Jarrell
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“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.”

ThinkingArtSaidLife IsArtistHoursWorstHairNeededSceneArt IsMadMilesIceFortyWorst ThingsFacilityWristsSkatesThink TwiceGliding
Author:Randall Jarrell
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“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.”

AbleReadingPiecesAirWorstReaderPagesThirdsFaithfulCommentEducateSystematicFrostHaving HopeAtticsHomelyRefutationLaconic
Author:Randall Jarrell
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“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.”

IfsSometimesSeemsMightAttitudeDoubtPositionPoetReaderGood ThingsFantasticNot SureNo DoubtClayRemarksFertileMuddleAuden
Author:Randall Jarrell
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“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.”

WellsEndsHalfCryHairClothesNakedProseQuartersVersesSheerEmperorIndignationHalf TruthWell DressedAlways Crying
Author:Randall Jarrell
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“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.”

ShouldFirstsPhilosophyPlayLastsInterestingAirPoetDemandMachinesPhilosophicalFlyingAbsurdMediumsInstancePianoPoetry IsRequirementsTanksSewingForlornMethodical
Author:Randall Jarrell
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