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Quote by Randall Jarrell

“One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.”

Author

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

“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.”

Should Firsts Philosophy Play Lasts Interesting Air Poet Demand Machines Philosophical Flying Absurd Mediums Instance Piano Poetry Is Requirements Tanks Sewing Forlorn Methodical

Author: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.”

Littles Habit Careful Teeth Usual Brushing

Author:Randall Jarrell

“If you never look just wrong to your contemporaries you will never look just right to posterity - every writer has to try to be, to some extent, sometimes, a law unto himself.”

Ifs Trying Looks Sometimes Law Posterity

Author:Randall Jarrell

“The Southern past, the Southern present, the Southern future, concentrated into Gertrude's voice, became one of red clay pine-barrens, of chain-gang camps, of housewives dressed in flour sacks who stare all day dully down into dirty sinks.”

Past Voice Red Chains Dirty Staring Camps Southern Clay Gang Housewife Flour Gertrude

Book:Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy

Source: Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy

“People had always seemed to Gertrude rather like the beasts in Animal Farm : all equally detestable, but some more equally detestable than others.”

People Animal Beast Farms Gertrude

Book:Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy

Source: Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy

“when General Eisenhower defined an intellectual as "a man who takes more words than is necessary to tell more than he knows", he was speaking not as a Republican but as an American.”

Knows Men Republican Intellectual Defined

Book:A sad heart at the supermarket: essays & fables

Source: A sad heart at the supermarket: essays & fables

“We are all so to speak intellectuals about something.”

Speak

Book:A sad heart at the supermarket: essays & fables

Source: A sad heart at the supermarket: essays & fables

“Kenneth Burke calls form the satisfaction of an expectation; The Man Who Loved Children is full of such satisfactions, but it has a good deal of the deliberate disappointment of an expectation that is also form.”

Men Children Form Deals He Man Expectations Disappointment Satisfaction Deliberate Kenneth

Author:Randall Jarrell

“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.”

Ifs Sometimes Individual Lines Caught Caught Up Soar Unprecedented Rapture

Author:Randall Jarrell

“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.”

Ifs Would Be Pieces Alive Written Worst Poet Essentials Dylan Texture

Author:Randall Jarrell

Quote by Randall Jarrell

Author

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