Randall Jarrell

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

— 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

One of our universities recently made a survey of the reading habits of the American public; it decided that forty-eight percent of all Americans read, during a year, no book at all. I picture to myself that reader — that non-reader, rather; one man out of every two — and I reflect, with shame: "Our poems are too hard for him." But so, too, are Treasure Island, Peter Rabbit, pornographic novels — any book whatsoever.

— Randall Jarrell

If we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a hundred, we say that they aren't like politicians at all, and our category of politician 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

One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.

— Randall Jarrell

Delmore carries such a petty, personally involved, New Yorkish atmosphere around with him it's almost unpleasant for me to see him. He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors.

— 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

I see at last that all the knowledgeAnd we call it wisdom. It is pain.

— Randall Jarrell

The nurse is the nightThe world and its life are her dreams.

— Randall Jarrell

And the world said, Child, you will not be missed.Man is the judgment of the world.

— Randall Jarrell

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

— Randall Jarrell

For this last savior, man,I find no fault in this just man.

— Randall Jarrell

We read our mail and counted up our missions —They said, "Here are the maps"; we burned the cities.

— Randall Jarrell

The soul has no assignments, neither cooks The books, just leafed through, whisper endlessly.

— Randall Jarrell

The ways we miss our lives are life.

— Randall Jarrell

Somewhere there must be All that I've never thought of — think of me!

— Randall Jarrell

His eye a ring inside a ring inside a ring The herd back to the pit of being.

— Randall Jarrell

Death and the devil, what are these to him? And the body underneath it says: I am.

— 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

How poet and public stared at each other with righteous indignation, till the poet said, “Since you won’t read me, I’ll make sure you can’t” — is one of the most complicated and interesting of stories.

— 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

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

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.

— Randall Jarrell

Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.

— Randall Jarrell

People always ask: For whom does the poet write? He needs only to answer, For whom do you do good? Are you kind to your daughter because in the end someone will pay you for being?... The poet writes his poem for its own sake, for the sake of that order of things in which the poem takes the place that has awaited it.

— Randall Jarrell

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

Taking the chance of making a complete fool of himself — and, sometimes, doing so — is the first demand that is made upon any real critic: he must stick his neck out just as the artist does, if he is to be of any real use to art.

— Randall Jarrell

As Blake said, there is no competition between true poets.

— Randall Jarrell

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

— 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

When you’re young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.

— Randall Jarrell

It is G.E. Moore at the spinet.

— Randall Jarrell

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

— Randall Jarrell

Butter not only wouldn’t melt in this mouth, it wouldn’t go in; one runs away, an urchin in the gutter and glad to be, murmuring: “The Queen of Spain has no legs.” … One’s eyes widen; one sits the poet down in the porch swing, starts to go off to get her a glass of lemonade, and sees her metamorphosed before one’s eyes into a new Critique of Practical Reason.., feminine gender...

— Randall Jarrell

Who would be such a fool as to make advances to his reader, advances which might end in rejection or, worse still, in acceptance?

— Randall Jarrell

What Miss Moore’s best poetry does, I can say best in her words: it “comes into and steadies the soul,” so that the reader feels himself “a life prisoner, but reconciled.”

— 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

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

President Robbins was so well adjusted to his environment that sometimes you could not tell which was the environment and which was President Robbins.

— 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

She said to Constance, parodying a line of poetry that attracted her, "In the United States, there one feels free." But she spoiled it by continuing, "Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster."

— Randall Jarrell

Animals, these beings trappedThe world goes by my cage and never sees me.

— Randall Jarrell

A bat is bornHer baby hangs on underneath.

— Randall Jarrell

Be, as you have been, my happiness;Let me sleep beside you, each night, like a spoon.

— Randall Jarrell

The new masters paint a subject as they please,Is the small radioactive planet men called Earth.

— Randall Jarrell

A farmer is separated from a farmerAt night the deer come out of the forest, eat his crops.

— Randall Jarrell

At night there are no more farmers, no more farms.The trees can't tell the two of them apart.

— Randall Jarrell

You give me the feeling that the universeWith something human.

— Randall Jarrell

We live in an age which eschews sentimentality as if it were a good deal more than the devil. (Actually, of course, a writer may be just as sentimental in laying undue emphasis on sexual crimes as on dying mothers: sentimental, like scientific, is an adjective that relates to method, not to matter.)

— Randall Jarrell

The writer does not get from his work as he writes and reads it the same aesthetic shock that the reader does; and since the writer is so accustomed to reading other stories, and having them produce a decided effect upon him, he is disquieted at not being equally affected by his own.

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

— Randall Jarrell

A good religious poem, today, is ambergris, and it is hard to enjoy it for thinking of all those suffering whales; but martyrs are born, not made.

— Randall Jarrell

We know from many experiences that this is what the work of art does: its life — in which we have shared the alien existences both of this world and of that different world to which the work of art alone gives us access — unwillingly accuses our lives.

— Randall Jarrell

One is forced to remember how far from "self-expression" great poems are — what a strange compromise between the demands of the self, the world, and Poetry they actually represent.

— 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

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 eighteenth century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.

— Randall Jarrell

Malraux writes in a language in which there is no way to say "perhaps" or "I don't know," so that after a while we grow accustomed to saying it for him.

— Randall Jarrell

Many young poets, nowadays, are insured against everything. For them poetry is a game like court tennis or squash racquets — one they learned at college — and they play it with propriety, as part of their social and academic existence; their poems are occasional verse for which life itself is only one more occasion.

— 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 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

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

— Randall Jarrell

The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.

— Randall Jarrell

If we judge by wealth and power, our times are the best of times; if the times have made us willing to judge by wealth and power, they are the worst of times.

— Randall Jarrell

You often feel about something in Shakespeare or Dostoevsky that nobody ever said such a thing, but it's just the sort of thing people would say if they could — is more real, in some sense, than what people do say. If you have given your imagination free rein, let things go as far as they want to go, the world they made for themselves while you watched can have, for you and later watchers, a spontaneous finality.

— Randall Jarrell