Randall Jarrell quotes - page 7
Lending a favorite book has its risks; the borrower may not like it. I still don't know a better novel than Crime and Punishment-still, every fourth or fifth borrower returns it unfinished: it depresses him; besides that, he didn't believe it. More borrowers than this return the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past unfinished: they were bored. There is no book you can lend people that all of them will like.
Randall Jarrell
We were given drinks, and drank them, and talked while we drank them. But talked, here, is a euphemism: we had that conversation about how you make a Martini. The people in Hell, Dr. Rosenbaum had told me once, say nothing but What? Americans in Hell tell each other how to make Martinis.
Randall Jarrell
The greatest American industry-why has no one ever said so?-is the industry of using words. We pay tens of millions of people to spend their lives lying to us, or telling us the truth, or supplying us with a nourishing medicinal compound of the two. All of us are living in the middle of a dark wood-a bright Technicolored forest-of words, words, words. It is a forest in which the wind is never still: there isn't a tree in the forest that is not, for every moment of its life and our lives, persuading or ordering or seducing or overawing us into buying this, believing that, voting for the other.
Randall Jarrell
One of our universities recently made a survey of the reading habits of the American public; it decided that forty-eight percent of all Americans read, during a year, no book at all. I picture to myself that reader - that non-reader, rather; one man out of every two - and I reflect, with shame: "Our poems are too hard for him." But so, too, are Treasure Island, Peter Rabbit, pornographic novels - any book whatsoever.
Randall Jarrell
[Robert Lowell] is a poet of both Will and Imagination, but his Will is always seizing his Imagination by the shoulders and saying to it in a grating voice: "Don't sit there fooling around; get to work!” - and his poor Imagination gets tense all over and begins to revolve determinedly and familiarly, like a squirrel in a squirrel-cage. Goethe talked about the half-somnambulistic state of the poet; but Mr. Lowell too often is either having a nightmare or else is wide awake gritting his teeth and working away at All The Things He Does Best. Cocteau said to poets: Learn what you can do and then don't do it; and this is so-we do it enough without trying. As a poet Mr. Lowell sometimes doesn't have enough trust in God and tries to do everything himself: he proposes and disposes - and this helps to give a certain monotony to his work.
Randall Jarrell
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
...a [literary] style can be a whole way of existing, so that you exist, for the moment, in perfect sympathy with it: you don't read it so much as listen to it as it sweeps you along-fast enough, often, to make you feel a blurred pleasure in your own speed. Often a phrase or sentence has the uncaring unconscious authority-how else could you say it?-that only a real style has.
Randall Jarrell
In Stage II guilt is first of all social, liberal, moral guilt-a guilt so general as to seem almost formal. It is we who are responsible, either by commission or-more generally-by omission, for everything from killing off the Tasmanians to burning the books at Alexandria. (You didn't do it? Then you should have stopped them from doing it. You never heard of it? Ignorant as well as evil, eh? You weren't born? You're guilty, I tell you-guilty.)
Randall Jarrell
Such cultural homosexuality is an alienation more or less forced upon certain groups of Auden's society by the form of their education and the nature of their social and financial conditions. Where the members of a class and a sex are taught, in a prolonged narcissistic isolation, to hero-worship themselves-class and sex; where-to a different class-unemployment is normal, where one's pay is inadequate or impossible for more than one; where children are expensive liabilities instead of assets; where women are business competitors; where most social relationships have become as abstract, individualistic, and mobile as the relations of the labor market, homosexuality is a welcome asset to the state, one of the cheapest and least dangerous forms of revolution.
Randall Jarrell
..."progress”, in poetry at least, comes not so much from digesting the last age as from rejecting it altogether (or, rather, from eating a little and leaving a lot), and...the world's dialectic is a sort of neo-Hegelian one in which one progresses not by resolving contradictions but by ignoring them.
Randall Jarrell