Randall Jarrell: Trending quotes (page 4)

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“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

“William Carlos Williams”, p. 216
Poetry and the Age (1953)

Learning

“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

“On Preparing to Read Kipling”, p. 125
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

Waiting

“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

“Contemporary Poetry Criticism”, p. 62
No Other Book: Selected Essays (1999)

Money , Universe

“Since Pharaoh’s bits were pushed into the jaws of kings, these dyings—patient or impatient, but dyings—have happened, by the hundreds of millions; they were all wasted. They taught us to kill others and to die ourselves, but never how to live. Who is “taught to live” by cruelty, suffering, stupidity, and that occupational disease of soldiers, death?”

Randall Jarrell

“Poetry in War and Peace”, p. 129
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Death , Stupidity , Disease , Suffering

“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

“The Taste of the Age”, p. 12
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

People , Music

“Auden is able to set up a We (whom he identifies himself with—rejection loves company) in opposition to the enemy They…”

Randall Jarrell

“Changes of Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden’s Poetry”, p. 116
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

Love

“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 book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Ch. 1, p. 11

“You give me the feeling that the universe
Was made by something more than human
For something less than human.
But I identify myself, as always,
With something that there's something wrong with,
With something human.”

Randall Jarrell

"The One Who Was Different"
The Lost World (1965)

Feeling , Universe

“…girls who had read Wittgenstein as high school baby-sitters were rejected because the school’s quota of abnormally intelligent students had already been filled that year.”

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 3: “Miss Batterson and Benton”, p. 80

School , Girl , Intelligence , Reading

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

Randall Jarrell

"The Obscurity of the Poet", p. 16
Poetry and the Age (1953)

Life , Animals

“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 Intellectual in America" (1955), from A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1962)
General sources

Intelligence

“What to leave out is the first thing the artist has to decide; a painter who “held the mirror up to nature” would spend his life on the leaves of one landscape. The work of art’s fluctuating and idiosyncratic threshold of attention—the great things disregarded, the small things seized and dwelt on—is as much of a signature as anything in it.”

Randall Jarrell

“The Profession of Poetry”, p. 162
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Life , Art , Nature

“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

“The Age of Criticism”, p. 79
Poetry and the Age (1953)

Fools , Art , Chance

“Oscar Williams’s new book is pleasanter and a little quieter than his old, which gave the impression of having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter.”

Randall Jarrell

precedes by twelve years Truman Capote’s putdown of Jack Kerouac: “That isn’t writing at all, it’s typing.”; “from Verse Chronicle”, p. 137
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Books

“New Directions is a reviewer’s nightmare; it’s enough punishment to read it all, without writing about it too.”

Randall Jarrell

In All Directions”, p. 87
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Reading

“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

“On Preparing to Read Kipling”, pp. 116–117
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

World , Feeling , Intelligence

“…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

of not wanting to write a preface for his first volume of verse, The Rage for the Lost Penny (1940); “A Note on Poetry”, p. 47
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Life

“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

"Ten Books," The Southern Review (Autumn 1935) [p. 8]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Reading

“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

“An Unread Book”, p. 46
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

Way , Time

“A poem is sort of an onion of contexts, and you can no more locate any of the important meanings exclusively in a part than you can locate a relation in one of its terms. The significance of a part may be greatly modified or even in extreme cases completely reversed by later and larger parts and by the whole.”

Randall Jarrell

“Texts from Housman”, p. 21
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Parting