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“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

“The Obscurity of the Poet”, p. 4
Poetry and the Age (1953)

“A farmer is separated from a farmer
By what farmers have in common: forests,
Those dark things — what the fields were to begin with.
At night a fox comes out of the forest, eats his chickens.
At night the deer come out of the forest, eat his crops.”

Randall Jarrell

"Field and Forest," lines 11-15
The Lost World (1965)

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

Randall Jarrell

"Five Poets," The Yale Review (Autumn 1956) [p. 263]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“…to Americans English manners are far more frightening than none at all…”

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 1, p. 12

“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. The child has not yet had the chance to know what it is like to be a grownup; he believes, even, that being a grownup is a mistake he will never make—when he grows up he will keep on being a child, a big child with power. So the child and grownup live in mutual love, misunderstanding, and distaste. Children shout and play and cry and want candy; grownups say Ssh! and work and scold and want steak. There is no disputing tastes as contradictory as these. It is not just Mowgli who was raised by a couple of wolves; any child is raised by a couple of grownups. Father and Mother may be nearer and dearer than anyone will ever be again—still, they are members of a different species. God is, I suppose, what our parents were; certainly the ogre of the stories is so huge, so powerful, and so stupid because that is the way a grownup looks to a child.
Grownups forget or cannot believe that they seem even more unreasonable to children than children seem to them.”

Randall Jarrell

“An Unread Book’, pp. 51–52
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“A man on a park bench has a lonely final look, as if to say: “Reduce humanity to its ultimate particles and you end here; beyond this single separate being you cannot go.” But if you look back into his life you cannot help seeing that he is separated off, not separate—is a later, singular stage of an earlier plural being. All the tongues of men were baby talk to begin with: go back far enough and which of us knew where he ended and Mother and Father and Brother and Sister began? The singular subject in its objective universe has evolved from that orginal composite entity—half subjective, half objective, having its own ways and laws and language, its own life and its own death—the family.”

Randall Jarrell

“An Unread Book”, p. 3; opening
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“…habits are happiness of a sort…”

Randall Jarrell

“An Unread Book”, p. 39
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“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

“An Unread Book”, p. 40
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“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

“Fifty Years of American Poetry”, p. 331
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“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

“Her Shield”, p. 177
Poetry and the Age (1953)

“…it is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life.”

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Ch. 4, p. 173

“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

As quoted in Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Times (1993) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 391
General sources

“A correct answer is like an affectionate kiss, Goethe said; a correct answer, Gertrude would have said, is like a slap in the face.”

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 2, p. 68

“Gertrude knew better than this, of course, but we all know better than we know better, or act as if we did.”

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 3, p. 100

“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 book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 1, p. 9

“This sort of admission of error, of change, makes us trust a critic as nothing else but omniscience could…”

Randall Jarrell

“B.H. Haggin”, p. 156
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“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

“An Unread Book”, p. 47
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“…the really damned not only like Hell, they feel loyal to it…”

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 1, p. 28

“She would have come from Paradise and complained to God that the apple wasn’t a winesap at all, but a great big pulpy Washington Delicious; and after the Ark she would have said that there had not been the animals, the spring rains, and the nice long ocean-voyage the prospectus from the travel agency had led her to expect—and that she had been most disappointed at not finding on Mount Ararat Prometheus.”

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 1, p. 9

“Marx said that he had stood Hegel on his head; often Mr. [Horace] Gregory has simply stood Pollyana on her head.”

Randall Jarrell

“Town Mouse, Country Mouse”, p. 70
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)