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Quote by 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.”

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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“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.”

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“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

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“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.”

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

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“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

“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.”

Should Real Produce Criticism Prison University Prisoner Continuing Vocation Hardened Counterfeit Counterfeit Money

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“A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry.”

People Knows Want Writing May Know How Successful Particular Poet Absurd Embarrassing Remarks Finality

Author:Randall Jarrell

“Underneath all his writing there is the settled determination to use certain words, to take certain attitudes, to produce a certain atmosphere; what he is seeing or thinking or feeling has hardly any influence on the way he writes. The reader can reply, ironically, "That's what it means to have a style"; but few people have so much of one, or one so obdurate that you can say of it, "It is a style that no subject can change.”

People Thinking Way Writing Mean Use Feelings Certain Attitude Seeing Influence Subjects Style Produce Reader Determination Atmosphere

Author:Randall Jarrell