“Most poets, most good poets even, no longer have the heart to write about what is most terrible in the world of the present: the bombs waiting beside the rockets, the hundreds of millions staring into the temporary shelter of their television sets, the decline of the West that seems less a decline than the fall preceding an explosion.”

—  Randall Jarrell

“Fifty Years of American Poetry”, pp. 332–333
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

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Randall Jarrell 215
poet, critic, novelist, essayist 1914–1965

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