A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or… — 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,… — 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… — 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… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
Robert Frost says in a piece of homely doggerel that he has hoped wisdom could be not only Attic but Laconic, Boeotian… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence. — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
If you look at the world with parted lips and a pure heart, and will the good, won't that make a true… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
originality" is everyone's aim, and novel techniques are as much prized as new scientific discoveries. [T.S.] Eliot states it with surprising naïveté:… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
“Someties it is hard to criticize, one wants only to chronicle. The good and mediocre books come in from week to week,… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
Few poets have made a more interesting rhetoric out of just fooling around: turning things upside down, looking at them from under… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
I shook myself; I was dreaming. As I went to bed the words of the eighth-grade class's teacher, when the class got… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
If my tone is mocking, the tone of someone accustomed to helplessness, this is natural: the poet is a condemned man for… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
If poetry were nothing but texture, [Dylan] Thomas would be as good as any poet alive. The what of his poems is… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
Poetry is a bad medium for philosophy. Everything in the philosophical poem has to satisfy irreconcilable requirements: for instance, the last demand… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
The usual bad poem in somebody's Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
Nowadays when a poet with one privately printed book can have his next three years taken care of by a Guggenheim fellowship,… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit,… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
Modern" poetry is, essentially, an extension of romanticism; it is what romantic poetry wishes or finds it necessary to become. It is… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
Imagism was a reductio ad absurdum of one or two tendencies of romanticism, such a beautifully and finally absurd one that it… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
Both in verse and in prose [Karl] Shapiro loves, partly out of indignation and partly out of sheer mischievousness, to tell the… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
I think Miss Moore was right to cut "The Steeple-Jack" - the poem seems plainer and clearer in its shortened state but… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share Image
I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine- tenths of our intellectuals… — 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
A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it. — 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
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![“Both in verse and in prose [Karl] Shapiro loves, partly…” quote by Randall Jarrell](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/a12/randall-jarrell-3811_always-crying_both-in-verse-and-in-prose-karl-shapiro_1665278.jpg)
![“Early in his life Mr. [Ezra] Pound met with strong,…” quote by Randall Jarrell](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/5a7/randall-jarrell-3811_ends_early-in-his-life-mr-ezra-pound-met-with_359433.jpg)