An author frequently chooses solemn or overwhelming subjects to write about; he is so impressed at writing about Life and Death that he does not notice that he is saying nothing of the slightest importance about either. Randall Jarrell More Quotes by Randall Jarrell More Quotes From Randall Jarrell 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 definitions culture thinking I shook myself; I was dreaming. As I went to bed the words of the eighth-grade class's teacher, when the class got to Evangeline , kept echoing in my ears: "We're coming to a long poem now, boys and girls. Now don't be babies and start counting the pages." I lay there like a baby, counting the pages over and over, counting the pages. Randall Jarrell girl dream baby The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it. Randall Jarrell length crafts narrative It is better to entertain an idea than to take home to live with you for the rest of your life. Randall Jarrell rest-of-your-life home ideas Some of Mr. Gregory's poems have merely appeared in The New Yorker ; others are New Yorker poems: the inclusive topicality, the informed and casual smartness, the flat fashionable irony, meaningless because it proceeds from a frame of reference whose amorphous superiority is the most definite thing about it they are the trademark not simply of a magazine but of a class. Randall Jarrell irony magazines class Few poets have made a more interesting rhetoric out of just fooling around: turning things upside down, looking at them from under the sofa, considering them (and their observer) curiously enough to make the reader protest, "That were to consider it too curiously. Randall Jarrell upside-down poet interesting 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 individual lines sometimes Anyone who has read Yeats's wonderful Autobiography will remember his Sligo shabby, shadowed, half country and half sea, full of confused romance, superstition, poverty, eccentricity, unrecognized anachronism, passion and ignorance and the little boy's misery. Yeats was treated well but was bitterly unhappy; he prayed that he would die, and used often to say to himself: "When you are grown up, never talk as grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood. Randall Jarrell confused passion country there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it. Randall Jarrell someday lines world We died like aunts of pets or foreigners. Randall Jarrell aunt pet death 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 gertrude kissing answers 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 naked clothes hair In Heaven all reviews will be favorable; here on earth, the publisher realizes, plausibility demands an occasional bad one, some convincing lump in all that leaven, and he accepts it somewhat as a theologian accepts Evil. Randall Jarrell demand evil heaven When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own; but to accept it because its stews taste exactly like your old mother's hash, or to reject it because the owl-headed goddess of wisdom in its temple is fatter than the Statue of Liberty, is an equal mark of that want of imagination, that inaccessibility to experience, of which each of us who dies a natural death will die. Randall Jarrell law mother country 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 law trying looks 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 teeth usual littles Poetry is a bad medium for philosophy. Everything in the philosophical poem has to satisfy irreconcilable requirements: for instance, the last demand that we should make of philosophy (that it be interesting) is the first we make of a poem; the philosophical poet has an elevated and methodical, but forlorn and absurd air as he works away at his flying tank, his sewing-machine that also plays the piano. Randall Jarrell philosophical air philosophy One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world. Randall Jarrell miracle enough world 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 obscurity reading doe If you look at the world with parted lips and a pure heart, and will the good, won't that make a true and beautiful poem? One's heart tells one that it will; and one's heart is wrong. There is no direct road to Parnassus. Randall Jarrell heart beautiful looks
