List of Randall Jarrell Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

When You're Young You Try To Be Methodical And Philosophical, But Reality Keeps Breaking In.

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.

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.

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.