Randall Jarrell Quotes & Sayings

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 ? — Randall Jarrell

The hunter and the mermaid were so different from each other that it seemed to them, finally, that they were exactly alike; and they lived together and were happy. — Randall Jarrell

It is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life. — Randall Jarrell

Christina Stead has a Chinese say, "Our old age is perhaps life's decision about us" or, worse, the decision we have made about ourselves without ever realizing we were making it. — Randall Jarrell

The tags' chain stirs with the wind; and I sleep
Paid, dead, and a soldier. Who fights for his own life
Loses, loses: I have killed for my world, and am free. — Randall Jarrell

Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so. — 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. — Randall Jarrell

I think Miss Moore was right to cut "The Steeple-Jack" the poem seems plainer and clearer in its shortened state but she has cut too much ... The reader may feel like saying, "Let her do as she pleases with the poem; it's hers, isn't it?" No; it's much too good a poem for that, it long ago became everybody's, and we can protest just as we could if Donatello cut off David's left leg. — Randall Jarrell

We always tend to distrust geniuses about genius, as if what they say didn't arouse much empathy in us, or as if we were waiting till some more reliable source of information came along ... — Randall Jarrell

The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks. — Randall Jarrell

The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time. — Randall Jarrell

If we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a hundred, we say they aren't like politicians at all, and our category of politicians stays unchanged; we know what politicians are like. — Randall Jarrell

The climate of our culture is changing. Under these new rains, new suns, small things grow great, and what was great grows small; whole species disappear and are replaced. — Randall Jarrell

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 — Randall Jarrell

All of them are gone except for me; and for me nothing is gone. — Randall Jarrell

When I was young and miserable and pretty
And poor, I'd wish
What all girls wish: to have a husband,
A house and children. Now that I'm old, my wish
Is womanish:
That the boy putting groceries in my car
See me. — Randall Jarrell

There are some good things and some fantastic ones in Auden's early attitude; if the reader calls it a muddle I shall acquiesce, with the remark that the later position might be considered a more rarefied muddle. But poets rather specialize in muddles and I have no doubt which of the muddles was better for Auden's poetry: one was fertile and usable, the other decidedly is not. Auden sometimes seems to be saying with Henry Clay, "I had rather be right than poetry"; but I am not sure, then, that he is either. — Randall Jarrell

Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise; a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks. — 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. — Randall Jarrell

If you look at the world with parted lips and a pure heart, and will the good, won't that make a true and beautiful poem? One's heart tells one that it will; and one's heart is wrong. There is no direct road to Parnassus . — Randall Jarrell

A person is a process, one that leads to death ... — Randall Jarrell

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. — Randall Jarrell

The safest way to avoid the world is through art; and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art. — Randall Jarrell

If my tone is mocking, the tone of someone accustomed to helplessness, this is natural: the poet is a condemned man for whom the State will not even buy breakfast and as someone said, If you're going to hang me, you mustn't expect to be able to intimidate me into sparing your feelings during the execution. — Randall Jarrell

If you've been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place. — Randall Jarrell

There is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it. — Randall Jarrell

If wishes were stories, beggars would read ... — 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. — Randall Jarrell

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. — Randall Jarrell

The best of causes ruins as quickly as the worst; and the road to Limbo is paved with writers who have done everything I am being sympathetic, not satiric for the very best reasons. — 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. — Randall Jarrell

The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces. — 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. — Randall Jarrell

Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it? — 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. — 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. — Randall Jarrell

He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors. — Randall Jarrell

May I die, not on the day When it no longer matters that I'm a woman, But on the day that it no longer matters That I am human: on that day When they put into me more than thy get out of me. So I say, in human vanity: have they ever Got out of me more than they put into me? May I die on the day the world ends. — Randall Jarrell

It's ugly, but is it art? — Randall Jarrell

We died like aunts of pets or foreigners. — Randall Jarrell

Both in verse and in prose [Karl] Shapiro loves, partly out of indignation and partly out of sheer mischievousness, to tell the naked truths or half-truths or quarter-truths that will make anybody's hair stand on end; he is always crying: "But he hasn't any clothes on!" about an emperor who is half the time surprisingly well-dressed. — 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 . — Randall Jarrell

The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it. — 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. — Randall Jarrell

A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it ... — Randall Jarrell

We are all so to speak intellectuals about something. — Randall Jarrell

We can't tell our life from our wish — 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. — Randall Jarrell

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose. — Randall Jarrell

One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child. — Randall Jarrell

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. — Randall Jarrell

To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all. — Randall Jarrell

I decided that Europeans and Americans are like men and women: they understand each other worse, and it matters less, than either of them suppose. — Randall Jarrell

She helped the hunter with the cooking as a husband helps his wife: when he had gone out to hunt and left something to stew, she would take the pot off the fire. But she never knew when to take it off; sometimes it was cooked to pieces, and she never got it right except by accident. But when the accident happened the hunter would laugh and say, "You're as good a cook as my mother!" After all, why should he want her to keep house? If you have a seal that could talk, would you want it to sweep the floor? — Randall Jarrell

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. — Randall Jarrell

Most people don't listen to classical music at all, but to rock-and-roll or hillbilly songs or some album named Music To Listen To Music By ... — Randall Jarrell

Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen. — Randall Jarrell

Habits are happiness of a sort ... — Randall Jarrell

Read at whim! read at whim! — Randall Jarrell

Many poets ... write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia. — Randall Jarrell

The really damned not only like Hell, they feel loyal to it ... — Randall Jarrell

The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed. — Randall Jarrell

When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in. — Randall Jarrell

[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. — Randall Jarrell

One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world. — 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. — Randall Jarrell

I see at least that all knowledge I wrung from the darkness
that the darkness flung me
is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing, the darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness and we call it wisdom. It is pain. — Randall Jarrell

A poet is a person who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightening five or six times. — Randall Jarrell

Most of the people in a war never fight for even a minute though they bear for years and die forever. They do not fight, but only starve, only suffer, only die: the sum of all this passive misery is that great activity, War. — Randall Jarrell

The moon rises. The red cubs rolling
In the ferns by the rotten oak
Stare over a marsh and a meadow
To the farm's white wisp of smoke.
A spark burns, high in heaven.
Deer thread the blossoming rows
Of the old orchard, rabbits
Hop by the well-curb. The cock crows
From the tree by the widow's walk;
Two stars in the trees to the west,
Are snared, and an owl's soft cry
Runs like a breath through the forest.
Here too, though death is hushed, though joy
Obscures, like night, their wars,
The beings of this world are swept
By the Strife that moves the stars. — Randall Jarrell

I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry. — Randall Jarrell

In Heaven all reviews will be favorable; here on earth, the publisher realizes, plausibility demands an occasional bad one, some convincing lump in all that leaven, and he accepts it somewhat as a theologian accepts Evil. — Randall Jarrell

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. — Randall Jarrell

There is something essentially ridiculous about critics, anyway: what is good is good without our saying so, and beneath all our majesty we know this. — Randall Jarrell

And the world said, Child, you will not be missed. You are cheaper than a wrench, your back is a road; Your death is a table in a book. You had our wit, our heart was sealed to you: Man is the judgment of the world. — Randall Jarrell

The days went by for him, all different and all the same. The boy was happy, and yet he didn't know that he was happy, exactly: he couldn't remember having been unhappy. If one day as he played at the edge of the forest some talking bird had flown down and asked him: "Do you like your life" he would not have known what to say, but would have asked the bird: "Can you not like it? — Randall Jarrell

I shook myself; I was dreaming. As I went to bed the words of the eighth-grade class's teacher, when the class got to Evangeline , kept echoing in my ears: "We're coming to a long poem now, boys and girls. Now don't be babies and start counting the pages." I lay there like a baby, counting the pages over and over, counting the pages. — Randall Jarrell

When you call people we you find it easy to be unfair to them, since you yourself are included in the condemnation. — 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. — Randall Jarrell

How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel? — Randall Jarrell

If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help. — Randall Jarrell

Age could not wither nor custom stale her infinite monotony: in fact, neither Age nor Custom could do anything (as they said, their voices rising) with the American novelist Gertrude Johnson. — 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. — 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. — Randall Jarrell

I simply don't want the poems mixed up with my life or opinions or picture or any other regrettable concomitants. I look like a bear and live in a cave; but you should worry. — 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. — Randall Jarrell

Doesn't the world need the painter's praise anymore? — Randall Jarrell

Oh, Tatyana,
The Angel comes: better to squawk like a chicken
Than to say with truth, "But I'm a good girl,"
And Meet his Challenge with a last firm strange
Uncomprehending smile; and - then, then! - see
The blind date that has stood you up: your life.
(For all this, if it isn't, perhaps, life,
Has yet, at least, a language of its own
Different from the books'; worse than the books'.)
And yet, the ways we miss our lives are life. — Randall Jarrell

The cat's asleep; I whisper "kitten"
Till he stirs a little and begins to purr
He doesn't wake. Today out on the limb
(The limb he thinks he can't climb down from)
He mewed until I heard him in the house.
I climbed up to get him down: he mewed.
What he says and what he sees are limited.
My own response is even more constricted.
I think, "It's lucky; what you have is too."
What do you have except
well, me?
I joke about it but it's not a joke;
The house and I are all he remembers.
Next month how will he guess that it is winter
And not just entropy, the universe
Plunging at last into its cold decline?
I cannot think of him without a pang.
Poor rumpled thing, why don't you see
That you have no more, really, than a man?
Men aren't happy; why are you? — Randall Jarrell

Few poets have made a more interesting rhetoric out of just fooling around: turning things upside down, looking at them from under the sofa, considering them (and their observer) curiously enough to make the reader protest, That were to consider it too curiously. — Randall Jarrell

Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we shall know everything the 18th century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us. — Randall Jarrell

More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader, and would no more read a book alone, if they could help it, than have a baby alone. — 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. — Randall Jarrell

It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad. — 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. — Randall Jarrell

Goethe said, "The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing"; Somerset Maugham says that the finest compliment he ever received was a letter in which one of his readers said: "I read your novel without having to look up a single word in the dictionary." These writers, plainly, lived in different worlds. — Randall Jarrell

Most works of art are, necessarily, bad ... ; one suffers through the many for the few. — Randall Jarrell

The critic said that once a year he read Kim; and he read Kim, it was plain, at whim: not to teach, not to criticize, just for love - he read it, as Kipling wrote it, just because he liked to, wanted to, couldn't help himself. To him it wasn't a means to a lecture or article, it was an end; he read it not for anything he could get out of it, but for itself. And isn't this what the work of art demands of us? The work of art, Rilke said, says to us always: You must change your life. It demands of us that we too see things as ends, not as means - that we too know them and love them for their own sake. This change is beyond us, perhaps, during the active, greedy, and powerful hours of our lives; but duringthe contemplative and sympathetic hours of our reading, our listening, our looking, it is surely within our power, if we choose to make it so, if we choose to let one part of our nature follow its natural desires. So I say to you, for a closing sentence, Read at whim! read at whim! — Randall Jarrell

Ruskin says that anyone who expects perfection from a work of art knows nothing of works of art. This is an appealing sentence that, so far as I can see, is not true about a few pictures and statues and pieces of music, short stories and short poems. Whether or not you expect perfection from them, you get it; at least, there is nothing in them that you would want changed. But what Ruskin says is true about novels: anyone who expects perfection from even the greatest novel knows nothing of novels. — Randall Jarrell

The ways we miss our lives are life. — Randall Jarrell