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Quote by 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.”

Quote by Randall Jarrell

Author

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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“An author frequently chooses solemn or overwhelming subjects to write about; he is so impressed at writing about Life and Death that he does not notice that he is saying nothing of the slightest importance about either.”

Writing Doe Subjects Importance Life And Death Overwhelming Impressed Solemn Saying Nothing

Author:Randall Jarrell

“Modern" poetry is, essentially, an extension of romanticism; it is what romantic poetry wishes or finds it necessary to become. It is the end product of romanticism, all past and no future; it is impossible to go further by any extrapolation of the process by which we have arrived, and certainly it is impossible to remain where we are who could endure a century of transition ?”

Ends Past Wish Process Impossible Modern Century Products Endure Poetry Is Transition Extensions Romanticism Romantic Poetry Modern Poetry

Author: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.”

Writing Believe Two Hard Political Found Numbers Poet Goes On Absurd Tendencies Repeats Logical Ads Construction Refuge Novelty Romanticism Hard To Believe Recurring Surrealist Decimals

Author: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.”

“there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.”

World Lines This World Someday Copies

Author:Randall Jarrell

“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.”

Want Firsts Art Book Situation Wife Drink Criticism Sells Critics Tendencies Works Of Art Publishing

Author:Randall Jarrell

“A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.”

Way Speak Forget

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

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

“Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise; a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.”

Thinking Men Defined Professors Scholar

Author:Randall Jarrell

“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 Statue of Liberty, is an equal mark of that want of imagination, that inaccessibility to experience, of which each of us who dies a natural death will die.”

“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.”

Art Matter Our Lives Occupation Magnificent Ornaments

Author:Randall Jarrell