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Randall Jarrell Quotes
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Randall Jarrell was an American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, novelist, and the 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position that now bears the title Poet Laureate.

✵ 6. May 1914 – 14. October 1965
Randall Jarrell: 215 quotes1 like

Randall Jarrell Quotes

“What we are most anxious about is our anxiety itself: the greatest of all sins, Auden learns from Kafka, is impatience—and he decides that the hero “is, in fact, one who is not anxious.” But it was inevitable that Auden should arrive at this point. His anxiety is fundamental; and the one thing that anxiety cannot do is to accept itself, to do nothing about itself—consequently it admires more than anything else in the world doing nothing, sitting still, waiting.”

Randall Jarrell

“Freud to Paul: The Stages of Auden’s Ideology”, p. 180
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“A culture is no better than its woods,” Auden writes. Fortunately for him, a book of poetry can be better than its poems. Two-thirds of The Shield of Achilles is non-Euclidean needlepoint, a man sitting on a chaise longue juggling four cups, four saucers, four sugar lumps, and the round-square: this is what great and good poets do when they don’t even bother to write great and good poems, now that they’ve learned that—it’s Auden’s leitmotif, these days—art is essentially frivolous. But a little of the time Auden is essentially serious, and the rest of the time he’s so witty, intelligent, and individual, so angelically skillful, that one reads with despairing enthusiasm, and enjoys Auden’s most complacently self-indulgent idiosyncrasy almost as one enjoys Sherlock Holmes’s writing Victoria Rex on the wall in bullet holes.”

Randall Jarrell

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

““My destiny is accomplished and I die content.” How often she made such quotations as these, said or felt or was them! For just as many Americans want art to be Life, so this American novelist wanted life to be Art, not seeing that many of the values—though not, perhaps, the final ones—of life and art are irreconcilable; so that her life looked coldly into the mirror that it held up to itself, and saw that it was full of quotations, of data and analysis and epigrams, of naked and shameful truths, of facts: it saw that it was a novel by Gertrude Johnson.”

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 5: “Gertrude and Sidney”, p. 214

“…good American poets are surprisingly individual and independent; they have little of the member-of-the-Academy, official man-of-letters feel that English or continental poets often have. When American poets join literary political parties, doctrinaire groups with immutable principles, whose poems themselves are manifestoes, the poets are ruined by it. We see this in the beatniks, with their official theory that you write a poem by putting down anything that happens to come into your head; this iron spontaneity of theirs makes it impossible for even a talented beatnik to write a good poem except by accident, since it eliminates the selection, exclusion, and concentration that are an essential part of writing a poem. Besides, their poems are as direct as true works of art are indirect: ironically, these conscious social manifestoes of theirs, these bohemian public speeches, make it impossible for the artist’s unconscious to operate as it normally does in the process of producing a work of art.”

Randall Jarrell

“Fifty Years of American Poetry”, pp. 327–328
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“…a poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it…”

Randall Jarrell

"The Woman at the Washington Zoo," [an essay about the writing of the poem by that name] from Understanding Poetry, third edition, ed. Cleanth Brooks (1960) [p. 319]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“Most works of art are, necessarily, bad…; one suffers through the many for the few.”

Randall Jarrell

“The Little Cars”, p. 200
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“Gertrude Johnson could feel no real respect for, no real interest in, anybody who wasn't a writer. For her there were two species: writers and people; and the writers were really people, and the people weren't.”

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 1, p. 22

“He loved hitherto-unthought-of, thereafter-unthinkable combinations of instruments. When some extraordinary array of players filed half-proudly, half-sheepishly on to the stage, looking like the Bremen Town Musicians—if those were, as I think they were, a rooster, a cat, a dog, and a donkey—you could guess beforehand that it was to be one of Gottfried’s compositions. His Joyous Celebration of the Memory of the Master Johann Sebastian Bach had a tone-row composed of the notes B, A, C, and H (in the German notation), of these inverted, and of these transposed; and there were four movements, the first played on instruments beginning with the letter b, the second on instruments beginning with the letter a, and so on. After the magnificent group that ushered in the piece (bugle, bass-viol, bassoon, basset-horn, bombardon, bass-drum, baritone, and a violinist with only his bow) it was sad to see an Alp horn and an accordion come in to play the second movement. Gottfriend himself said about the first group: “Vot a bunch!””

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

When I asked him how he had thought of it he said placidly: “De devil soldt me his soul.”
Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 4: “Constance and the Rosenbaums”, p. 136

“That most human and American of presidents—of Americans—Abraham Lincoln, said as a young man: “The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.” It’s a hard heart, and a dull one, that doesn’t go out to that sentence. The man who will make us see what we haven’t seen, feel what we haven’t felt, understand what we haven’t understood—he is our best friend. And if he knows more than we do, that is an invitation to us, not an indictment of us. And it is not an indictment of him, either; it takes all sorts of people to make a world—to make, even, a United States of America.”

Randall Jarrell

“The Intellectual in America”, p. 15; conclusion
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

“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

"On Preparing to Read Kipling," introduction to The Best Short Stories of Rudyard Kipling (1961) [p. 335]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“Miss Rasmussen made a welded sculpture. Her statues were—as she would say, smiling—untouched by human hands; and they looked it. You could tell one from another, if you wanted to, but it was hard to want to. You felt, yawning: It’s ugly, but is it Art?
Miss Rasmussen also designed furniture, but people persisted in sitting down in her sculpture, and in asking “What is that named?” of her chairs. This showed how advanced her work was, and pleased her; yet when she laughed to show her pleasure, her laugh sounded thin and strained.”

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 6: “Art Night”, p. 228

“The characteristic poetic strategy of our time—refine your singularities—is something Auden has not learned; so his best poems are very peculiarly good, nearly the most interesting poems of our time. When he writes badly, we can afford to be angry at him, and he can afford to laugh at us.”

Randall Jarrell

“Poetry in a Dry Season”, p. 37
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“The motto of his [Robinson Jeffers’s] work is “More! More!”—but as Tolstoy says, “A wee bit omitted, overemphasized, or exaggerated in poetry, and there is no contagion”; and Frost, bearing him out, says magnificently: “A very little of anything goes a long way in a work of art.””

Randall Jarrell

“Fifty Years of American Poetry”, pp. 322–323
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“…one straggles gracelessly through a wilderness of common sense. It is an experience for which the reader of modern criticism is unprepared: in that jungle through which one wanders, with its misshapen and extravagant and cannibalistic growths, bent double with fruit and tentacles, disquieting with their rank eccentric life, one comes surprisingly on something so palely healthy: a decorous plant, without thorns or flowers, rootless in the thin sand of the drawing room.”

Randall Jarrell

of Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay by Louis MacNiece, “From That Island”, pp. 31–32
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“…just as great men are great disasters, overwhelmingly good poets are overwhelmingly bad influences.”

Randall Jarrell

“The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p. 66
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“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

“Her Shield”, p. 178
Poetry and the Age (1953)

“Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so.”

Randall Jarrell

“Malraux and the Statues at Bamberg”, p. 191
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

“There are some good things and some fantastic ones in Auden’s early attitude; if the reader calls it a muddle I shall acquiesce, with the remark that the later position might be considered a more rarefied muddle. But poets rather specialize in muddles—and I have no doubt which of the muddles was better for Auden’s poetry: one was fertile and usable, the other decidedly is not. Auden sometimes seems to be saying with Henry Clay, “I had rather be right than poetry”; but I am not sure, then, that he is either.”

Randall Jarrell

“Changes of Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden’s Poetry”, p. 131
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“At night there are no more farmers, no more farms.
At night the fields dream, the fields are the forest.
The boy stands looking at the fox
As if, if he looked long enough — he looks at it.
Or is it the fox is looking at the boy?
The trees can't tell the two of them apart.”

Randall Jarrell

"Field and Forest," lines 45-50
The Lost World (1965)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“…“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)

“…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)

“[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)