Randall Jarrell quotes

Randall Jarrell was an American poet, literary critic, and novelist known for his insightful and moving works. His poetry often explored themes of childhood, war, and the inner struggles of ordinary people. He influenced generations of writers with his keen critical voice and poignant verse. Here are 212 of his quotes:

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. (Randall Jarrell)
The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks. View quote
Randall Jarrell
...it is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life. View quote
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. View quote
Randall Jarrell
...to Americans English manners are far more frightening than none at all... View quote
Randall Jarrell
If we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a hundred, we say that they aren't like politicians at all, and our category of politician stays unchanged; we know what politicians are like. View quote
Randall Jarrell
The Southern past, the Southern present, the Southern future, concentrated into Gertrude's voice, became one of red clay pine-barrens, of chain-gang camps, of housewives dressed in flour sacks who stare all day dully down into dirty sinks. View quote
Randall Jarrell
"Modern” poetry is, essentially, an extension of romanticism; it is what romantic poetry wishes or finds it necessary to become. It is the end product of romanticism, all past and no future; it is impossible to go further by any extrapolation of the process by which we have arrived, and certainly it is impossible to remain where we are-who could endure a century of transition? View quote
Randall Jarrell
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. View quote
Randall Jarrell
...I simply don't want the poems mixed up with my life or opinions or picture or any other regrettable concomitants. I look like a bear and live in a cave; but you should worry. View quote
Randall Jarrell
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)
A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad - and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry. View quote
Randall Jarrell
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. View quote
Randall Jarrell
...habits are happiness of a sort... View quote
Randall Jarrell
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. View quote
Randall Jarrell
Many poets...write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia. View quote
Randall Jarrell
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. View quote
Randall Jarrell
...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. View quote
Randall Jarrell
Goethe said that the worst thing in art is technical facility accompanied by triteness. Many an artist, like God, has never needed to think twice about anything. His works are the mad scene from Giselle, on ice skates: he weeps, pulls out his hair-holding his wrists like Lifar-and tells you what Life is, all at a gliding forty miles an hour. View quote
Randall Jarrell
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. View quote
Randall Jarrell
I don't need to praise anything so justly famous as Frost's observation of and empathy with everything in Nature from a hornet to a hillside; and he has observed his own nature, one person's random or consequential chains of thoughts and feelings and perceptions, quite as well. (And this person, in the poems, is not the "alienated artist” cut off from everybody who isn't, yum-yum, another alienated artist; he is someone like normal people only more so - a normal person in the less common and more important sense of normal.) (Randall Jarrell)
...when General Eisenhower defined an intellectual as "a man who takes more words than is necessary to tell more than he knows”, he was speaking not as a Republican but as an American. View quote
Randall Jarrell
The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time. View quote
Randall Jarrell
We are all-so to speak-intellectuals about something. View quote
Randall Jarrell
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. View quote
Randall Jarrell