Randall Jarrell quotes - Page : 5

" One is forced to remember how far from "self-expression" great poems are — what a strange compromise between the demands of the self, the world, and Poetry they actually represent. " # Poetry and Poets # Compromise # Business

" 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. It is better to write about other people's poetry. " # Poetry and Poets # Love # Writers and Writing

" Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we shall know everything the eighteenth century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us. " # Poetry and Poets # Death and Dying # Opportunity

" Malraux writes in a language in which there is no way to say "perhaps" or "I don't know," so that after a while we grow accustomed to saying it for him. " # Language # Writers and Writing # Love

" Many young poets, nowadays, are insured against everything. For them poetry is a game like court tennis or squash racquets — one they learned at college — and they play it with propriety, as part of their social and academic existence; their poems are occasional verse for which life itself is only one more occasion. " # Poetry and Poets # Insurance # Tennis

" Underneath all his writing there is the settled determination to use certain words, to take certain attitudes, to produce a certain atmosphere; what he is seeing or thinking or feeling has hardly any influence on the way he writes. The reader can reply, ironically, "That's what it means to have a style"; but few people have so much of one, or one so obdurate that you can say of it, "It is a style that no subject can change." " # Prayer # Writers and Writing # Books - Reading

" If you look at the world with parted lips and a pure heart, and will the good, won't that make a true and beautiful poem? One's heart tells one that it will; and one's heart is wrong. There is no direct road to Parnassus. " # Poetry and Poets # Love # Beauty

" When you call people we you find it easy to be unfair to them, since you yourself are included in the condemnation. " # Critics and Criticism # Love # Age and Aging

" If we judge by wealth and power, our times are the best of times; if the times have made us willing to judge by wealth and power, they are the worst of times. " # Wealth # Judgment and Judges # Power

" A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it. " # Poetry and Poets # Books - Reading # Truth