Randall Jarrell
Randall Jarrell
Randall Jarrellwas an American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, novelist, and the 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position that now bears the title Poet Laureate...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth6 May 1914
CountryUnited States of America
process persons
A person is a process, one that leads to death...
men shadow sun
Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?
children book heart
And the world said, Child, you will not be missed. You are cheaper than a wrench, your back is a road; Your death is a table in a book. You had our wit, our heart was sealed to you: Man is the judgment of the world.
different lexicon looks
Goethe said, "The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing"; Somerset Maugham says that the finest compliment he ever received was a letter in which one of his readers said: "I read your novel without having to look up a single word in the dictionary." These writers, plainly, lived in different worlds.
writing poet cures
Many poets...write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
voice age gertrude
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.
happens
Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen.
manners frightening
To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all.
thinking nine culture
I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine- tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry
art way world
The safest way to avoid the world is through art; and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art.
pain ignorance darkness
I see at last that all the knowledge I wrung from the darkness - that darkness flung me - Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness And we call it wisdom. It is pain.
mother dream sleep
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
art long insects
Art is long, and critics are the insects of a day.
oysters pearls
Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.