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Quote by 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.”

Quote by Randall Jarrell

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Randall Jarrell
Randall Jarrell

Randall Jarrell was an influential American poet, born on May 6, 1914, and died on October 14, 1965. His poetry is known for its profound emotion and unique style, considered a significant representative of American poetry in the 20th century. more

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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”

PeopleIfsThinkingWritingEndsStrongFoolMetsGood ThingsOppositionPoundsOpposingUnintelligentTrue Things
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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.”

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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.”

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Author:Randall Jarrell
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