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.Collection: Poetry
The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.Collection: Age
A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.
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.
He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors.
It is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life.
In the United States, there one feels free... Except from the Americans - but every pearl has its oyster.
To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all.
If we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a hundred, we say they aren't like politicians at all, and our category of politicians stays unchanged; we know what politicians are like.
I decided that Europeans and Americans are like men and women: they understand each other worse, and it matters less, than either of them suppose.
The blind date that has stood you up: your life.
If wishes were stories, beggars would read.Collection: Wish
A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.Collection: Way
The ways we miss our lives are life.Collection: Missing
One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.Collection: Wisdom
Pain comes from the darkness. And we call it wisdom. It is pain.Collection: Hurt
Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.Collection: Animal
most of the people in a war never fight for even a minute though they bear for years and die forever. They do not fight, but only starve, only suffer, only die: the sum of all this passive misery is that great activity, War.Collection: War
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.Collection: Fall
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.Collection: Reality
The safest way to avoid the world is through art; and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art.Collection: Art
We can't tell our life from our wishCollection: Wish
our quarrels with the world are like our quarrels with God: no matter how right we are, we are wrong.Collection: World
The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.Collection: Dark
If you've been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place.Collection: Equality
there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.Collection: World
The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.Collection: Crafts
Read at whim! Read at whim!Collection: Happiness
We are all so to speak intellectuals about something.Collection: Speak
You give me the feeling that the universe Was made by something more than human For something less than human. But I identify myself, as always, With something that there's something wrong with, With something human.Collection: Giving
It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.Collection: Believe
Christina Stead has a Chinese say, "Our old age is perhaps life's decision about us" or, worse, the decision we have made about ourselves without ever realizing we were making it.Collection: Decision
Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself.Collection: Art
Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.Collection: Oysters
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.Collection: Girl
When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.Collection: Philosophical
How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel?Collection: Mean
And the world said, Child, you will not be missed. You are cheaper than a wrench, your back is a road; Your death is a table in a book. You had our wit, our heart was sealed to you: Man is the judgment of the world.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Attitude
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.Collection: Clothes
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.Collection: Lines
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.Collection: Essentials
Underneath all his writing there is the settled determination to use certain words, to take certain attitudes, to produce a certain atmosphere; what he is seeing or thinking or feeling has hardly any influence on the way he writes. The reader can reply, ironically, "That's what it means to have a style"; but few people have so much of one, or one so obdurate that you can say of it, "It is a style that no subject can change.Collection: Determination
We read our mail and counted up our missions In bombers named for girls, we burned The cities we had learned about in school Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among The people we had killed and never seen. When we lasted long enough they gave us medals; When we died they said, "Our casualties were low." They said, "Here are the maps"; we burned the cities.Collection: Girl
We always tend to distrust geniuses about genius, as if what they say didn't arouse much empathy in us, or as if we were waiting till some more reliable source of information came along...Collection: Empathy
The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Interesting
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.Collection: Art