Randall Jarrell Quotes

Sometimes it is hard to criticize, one wants only to chronicle. The good and mediocre books come in from week to week, and I put them aside and read them and think of what to say; but the "worthless" books come in day after day, like the cries and truck sounds from the street, and there is nothing that anyone could think of that is good enough for them. In the bad type of thin pamphlets, in hand-set lines on imported paper, people's hard lives and hopeless ambitions have expressed themselves more directly and heartbreakingly than they have ever expressed in any work of art: it is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with "This is a poem" scrawled on them in lipstick. After a while one is embarrassed not so much for them as for poetry, which is for these poor poets one more of the openings against which everyone in the end beats his brains out; and one finds it unbearable that poetry should be so hard to write — a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey in which there is for most of the players no tail, no donkey, not even a booby prize.

[Alexander North] Whitehead is supposed to have said of, Bertrand] Russell: “Bertie thinks me muddleheaded and I think Bertie simple-minded.”

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, and end by thinking things true or good simply because you write them

Individualism, isolation, alienation. The poet is not only different from society, he is as different as possible from other poets; all this differentness is exploited to the limit — is used as subject matter, even. Each poet develops an elaborate, “personalized”, bureaucratized machinery of effect; refine your singularities is everybody’s maxim.

...it is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life.

Sam is a repetitive, comic process that merely marks time: he gets nowhere, but then he doesn’t want to get anywhere. Although there is no possibility of any real change in Sam, he never stops changing: Sam stays there inside Sam, getting less and less like the rest of mankind and more and more like Sam, Sam squared, Sam cubed, Sam to the nth.

Mrs. Robbins asked: “If I am not for myself, who then is for me?” — and she was for herself so passionately that the other people in the world decided that they were not going to let Pamela Robbins beat them at her own game, and stopped playing.

...the work of a poet who has a real talent, but not for words.

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.

Delmore carries such a petty, personally involved, New Yorkish atmosphere around with him it's almost unpleasant for me to see him. He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors.

It is odd how pleasant and sympathetic her poems are, in these days when many a poet had rather walk down children like Mr. Hyde than weep over them like Swinburne, and when many a poem is gruesome occupational therapy for a poet who stays legally innocuous by means of it.

All his tunk-a-tunks, his hoo-goo-boos — those mannered, manufactured, individual, uninteresting little sound-inventions — how typical they are of the lecture-style of the English philosopher, who makes grunts or odd noises, uses homely illustrations, and quotes day in and day out from Alice, in order to give what he says some appearance of that raw reality it so plainly and essentially lacks. These “tootings at the wedding of the soul” are fun for the tooter, but get as dreary for the reader as do all the foreign words — a few of these are brilliant, a few more pleasant, and the rest a disaster: “one cannot help deploring his too extensive acquaintance with the foreign languages”, as Henry James said, of Walt Whitman, to Edith Wharton.

...to Americans English manners are far more frightening than none at all...

Oscar Williams’s new book is pleasanter and a little quieter than his old, which gave the impression of having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter.

Age could not wither nor custom stale her infinite monotony: in fact, neither Age nor Custom could do anything (as they said, their voices rising) with the American novelist Gertrude Johnson.