When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own; but to accept it because its stews taste exactly like your old mother's… — 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 stew, she would take the pot off the fire. But she never knew when to take it off; sometimes it was cooked to pieces, and she never got it right except by accident. But when the… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share
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 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.… — Randall Jarrell Copy Share
![“Early in his life Mr. [Ezra] Pound met with strong, continued, and unintelligent opposition. If people keep opposing you when you are right, you think them fools; and after a time, right or wrong, you think them fools simply because they oppose you. Similarly, you write true things or good things…” 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)
