Randall Jarrell quotes - page 9

My destiny is accomplished and I die content. (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. View quote
Randall Jarrell
...man is the animal that moralizes. Man is also the animal that complains about being one, and says that there is an animal, a beast inside him - that he is brother to dragons. View quote
Randall Jarrell
What we are most anxious about is our anxiety itself: the greatest of all sins, Auden learns from Kafka, is impatience - and he decides that the hero "is, in fact, one who is not anxious.”. View quote
Randall Jarrell
It is ugly ducklings, grown either into swans or into remarkably big, remarkably ugly ducks, who are responsible for most works of art; and yet how few of these give a truthful account of what it was like to be an ugly duckling! View quote
Randall Jarrell
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. View quote
Randall Jarrell
I see at last that all the knowledgeI wrung from the darkness - that the darkness flung me - Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing, The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness And we call it wisdom. It is pain. View quote
Randall Jarrell
If my tone is mocking, the tone of someone accustomed to helplessness, this is natural: the poet is a condemned man for whom the State will not even buy breakfast - and as someone said, "If you're going to hang me, you mustn't expect to be able to intimidate me into sparing your feelings during the execution.”. View quote
Randall Jarrell
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. View quote
Randall Jarrell
Goethe said, "The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing"; Somerset Maugham says that the finest compliment he ever received was a letter in which one of his readers said: "I read your novel without having to look up a single word in the dictionary." These writers, plainly, lived in different worlds. View quote
Randall Jarrell
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. (Randall Jarrell)
The round-square may be impossible, but we believe in it because it is impossible. [E.E.] Cummings is a very great expert in all these, so to speak, illegal syntactical devices: his misuse of parts of speech, his use of negative prefixes, his word-coining, his systematic relation of words that grammar and syntax don't permit us to relate - all this makes him a magical bootlegger or moonshiner of language, one who intoxicates us on a clear liquor no government has legalized with its stamp. View quote
Randall Jarrell