Randall Jarrell: Trending quotes (page 9)

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

Randall Jarrell

“A Verse Chronicle”, p. 149
Poetry and the Age (1953)

“…we are willing to admit the normality of the abnormal—are willing to admit that we never understood the normal better than when it has been allowed to reach its full growth and become the abnormal.”

Randall Jarrell

“An Unread Book”, p. 5
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“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

"On the Underside of the Stone," The New York Times Book Review (1953-08-23) [p. 177]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Death

“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

"The Profession of Poetry," Partisan Review (September/October 1950) [p. 168]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

World

“All his tunk-a-tunks, his hoo-goo-boos — those mannered, manufactured, individual, uninteresting little sound-inventions — how typical they are of the lecture-style of the English philosopher, who makes grunts or odd noises, uses homely illustrations, and quotes day in and day out from Alice, in order to give what he says some appearance of that raw reality it so plainly and essentially lacks. These “tootings at the wedding of the soul” are fun for the tooter, but get as dreary for the reader as do all the foreign words — a few of these are brilliant, a few more pleasant, and the rest a disaster: “one cannot help deploring his too extensive acquaintance with the foreign languages”, as Henry James said, of Walt Whitman, to Edith Wharton.”

Randall Jarrell

“Reflections on Wallace Stevens”, p. 129
Poetry and the Age (1953)

Quotes , Home , Soul , Reality

“…“originality” is everyone’s aim, and novel techniques are as much prized as new scientific discoveries. [T. S. ] Eliot states it with surprising naïveté: “It is exactly as wasteful for a poet to do what has been done already as for a biologist to rediscover Mendel’s discoveries.””

Randall Jarrell

of modernism; “The End of the Line”, pp. 79–80
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“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

"Malraux and the Statues at Baumberg," Art News (December 1953) [p. 180]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Way

“…a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it…”

Randall Jarrell

“An Unread Book”, p. 50
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“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

“Changes of Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden’s Poetry”, p. 149
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“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

“Three Books”, p. 230
Poetry and the Age (1953)

Law

“[W. H. ] Auden has gone in the right direction, and a great deal too far.”

Randall Jarrell

“Poetry in a Dry Season”, p. 36
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“Our society, it turns out, can use modern art. A restaurant, today, will order a mural by Míro in as easy and matter-of-fact a spirit as, twenty-five years ago, it would have ordered one by Maxfield Parrish. The president of a paint factory goes home, sits down by his fireplace—it looks like a chromium aquarium set into the wall by a wall-safe company that has branched out into interior decorating, but there is a log burning in it, he calls it a firelace, let’s call it a fireplace too—the president sits down, folds his hands on his stomach, and stares at two paintings by Jackson Pollock that he has hung on the wall opposite him. He feels at home with them; in fact, as he looks at them he not only feels at home, he feels as if he were back at the paint factory. And his children—if he has any—his children cry for Calder. He uses thoroughly advanced, wholly non-representational artists to design murals, posters, institutional advertisements: if we have the patience (or are given the opportuity) to wait until the West has declined a little longer, we shall all see the advertisements of Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, and Smith illustrated by Jean Dubuffet.
This president’s minor executives may not be willing to hang a Kandinsky in the house, but they will wear one, if you make it into a sport shirt or a pair of swimming-trunks; and if you make it into a sofa, they will lie on it. They and their wives and children will sit on a porcupine, if you first exhibit it at the Museum of Modern Art and say that it is a chair. In fact, there is nothing, nothing in the whole world that someone won’t buy and sit in if you tell him it is a chair: the great new art form of our age, the one that will take anything we put in it, is the chair. If Hieronymus Bosch, if Christian Morgenstern, if the Marquis de Sade were living at this hour, what chairs they would be designing!”

Randall Jarrell

“The Taste of the Age”, pp. 19–20
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

Children , Lie , Age , World

“[Robert Lowell] is a poet of both Will and Imagination, but his Will is always seizing his Imagination by the shoulders and saying to it in a grating voice: “Don’t sit there fooling around; get to work!” — and his poor Imagination gets tense all over and begins to revolve determinedly and familiarly, like a squirrel in a squirrel-cage. Goethe talked about the half-somnambulistic state of the poet; but Mr. Lowell too often is either having a nightmare or else is wide awake gritting his teeth and working away at All The Things He Does Best. Cocteau said to poets: Learn what you can do and then don’t do it; and this is so—we do it enough without trying. As a poet Mr. Lowell sometimes doesn’t have enough trust in God and tries to do everything himself: he proposes and disposes — and this helps to give a certain monotony to his work.”

Randall Jarrell

“Three Books”, p. 236
Poetry and the Age (1953)

God , Fools , Imagination , Learning

“Sam is a repetitive, comic process that merely marks time: he gets nowhere, but then he doesn’t want to get anywhere. Although there is no possibility of any real change in Sam, he never stops changing: Sam stays there inside Sam, getting less and less like the rest of mankind and more and more like Sam, Sam squared, Sam cubed, Sam to the nth.”

Randall Jarrell

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

Change , Time

“…we like somebody who succeeds with such bad conscience, and who seems to wish that he had the nerve to be a failure or, better still, something to which the terms success and failure don’t apply—as when Mallory said, about Everest: “Success is meaningless here.””

Randall Jarrell

“ ‘Very Graceful Are the Uses of Culture’ ”, p. 206
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Failure , Success

“…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

of Hart Crane’s The Bridge, “Fifty Years of American Poetry”, p. 324
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“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

“Poetry in a Dry Season”, p. 36
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Success

“People had always seemed to Gertrude rather like the beasts in Animal Farm: all equally detestable, but some more equally detestable than others…”

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

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

People , Animals

“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.”

Randall Jarrell

“ ‘Very Graceful Are the Uses of Culture’ ”, p. 211
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Books , Art , Drink , Time

“Compare the saint who, asked what he would do if he had only an hour to live, replied that he would go on with his game of chess, since it was as much worship as anything else he had ever done.”

Randall Jarrell

“These Are Not Psalms”, p. 124
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Game