140 Quotes by Randall Jarrell

If my tone is mocking, the tone of someone accustomed to helplessness, this is natural: the poet is a condemned man for whom the State will not even buy breakfast and as someone said, "If you're going to hang me, you mustn't expect to be able to intimidate me into sparing your feelings during the execution.

When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.

How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel?

In Heaven all reviews will be favorable; here on earth, the publisher realizes, plausibility demands an occasional bad one, some convincing lump in all that leaven, and he accepts it somewhat as a theologian accepts Evil.

One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.

Poetry is a bad medium for philosophy. Everything in the philosophical poem has to satisfy irreconcilable requirements: for instance, the last demand that we should make of philosophy (that it be interesting) is the first we make of a poem; the philosophical poet has an elevated and methodical, but forlorn and absurd air as he works away at his flying tank, his sewing-machine that also plays the piano.

The usual bad poem in somebody's Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and little emptier than, brushing one's teeth.

If you never look just wrong to your contemporaries you will never look just right to posterity every writer has to try to be, to some extent, sometimes, a law unto himself.

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.