Early in his life Mr. [Ezra] Pound met with strong, continued, and unintelligent opposition. If people keep opposing you when you are… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence. — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
It is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life. — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed. — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
The rusty Pump pumps over your sweating face the clear Water, cold, so cold! you cup your hands And gulp from them… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
Christina Stead has a Chinese say, "Our old age is perhaps life's decision about us" or, worse, the decision we have made… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
I simply don't want the poems mixed up with my life or opinions or picture or any other regrettable concomitants. I look… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
“The days went by for him, all different and all the same. The boy was happy, and yet he didn't know that… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
It is like any other work of art. It is and never can be changed. Behind everything there is always The unknown… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
An author frequently chooses solemn or overwhelming subjects to write about; he is so impressed at writing about Life and Death that… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
“She helped the hunter with the cooking as a husband helps his wife: when he had gone out to hunt and left something to… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
We read our mail and counted up our missions In bombers named for girls, we burned The cities we had learned about in school… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Goethe said that the worst thing in art is technical facility accompanied by triteness. Many an artist, like God, has never needed to think… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
Age could not wither nor custom stale her infinite monotony: in fact, neither Age nor Custom could do anything (as they said, their voices… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times. — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader, and would no more read a book… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
“The tags' chain stirs with the wind; and I sleep Paid, dead, and a soldier. Who fights for his own life Loses, loses: I… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
First one gets works of art, then criticism of them, then criticism of the criticism, and, finally, a book on The Literary Situation ,… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
Early in his life Mr. [Ezra] Pound met with strong, continued, and unintelligent opposition. If people keep opposing you when you are right, you… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
Some of Mr. Gregory's poems have merely appeared in The New Yorker ; others are New Yorker poems: the inclusive topicality, the informed and… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image