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Quote by Randall Jarrell

“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.”

Quote by Randall Jarrell

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

Work

A sad heart at the supermarket: essays & fables

This book presents a series of essays and fables that delve into the complexities of the human heart, touching upon various aspects of life and emotion. The essays and fables are crafted to reflect on the human condition, offering readers a contemplative and introspective journey through a variety of emotional landscapes. more

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

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

“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

Author:Randall Jarrell

“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

“We read our mail and counted up our missions In bombers named for girls, we burned The cities we had learned about in school Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among The people we had killed and never seen. When we lasted long enough they gave us medals; When we died they said, "Our casualties were low." They said, "Here are the maps"; we burned the cities.”

People Long Said Enough Body School Girl Cities Our Lives Lows Died Lays Missions Maps Mail Burned They Said Medal Casualties Bombers

Author:Randall Jarrell

“I don't need to praise anything so justly famous as Frost's observation of and empathy with everything in Nature from a hornet to a hillside; and he has observed his own nature, one person's random or consequential chains of thoughts and feelings and perceptions, quite as well. (And this person, in the poems, is not the "alienated artist" cut off from everybody who isn't, yum-yum, another alienated artist; he is someone like normal people only more so - a normal person in the less common and more important sense of normal.)”

People Needs Wells Persons Important Feelings Artist Common Cutting Normal Perception Empathy Praise Observation Chains Frost Thoughts And Feelings Hornets

Author:Randall Jarrell

“An intelligent man said that the world felt Napoleon as a weight, and that when he died it would give a great oof of relief. This is just as true of Byron, or of such Byrons of their days as Kipling and Hemingway: after a generation or two the world is tired of being their pedestal, shakes them of with an oof, and then - hoisting onto its back a new world-figure - feels the penetrating satisfaction of having made a mistake all its own.”