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
writing life-and-death doe
An author frequently chooses solemn or overwhelming subjects to write about; he is so impressed at writing about Life and Death that he does not notice that he is saying nothing of the slightest importance about either.
believe writing two
Imagism was a reductio ad absurdum of one or two tendencies of romanticism, such a beautifully and finally absurd one that it is hard to believe it existed as anything but a logical construction; and what imagist found it possible to go on writing imagist poetry? A number of poets have stopped writing entirely; others, like recurring decimals, repeat the novelties they commeced with, each time less valuably than before. And there are surrealist poetry, and political poetry, and all the othe refuges of the indigent.
writing successful people
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.
determination attitude writing
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.
writing poet
whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.
writing poet cures
Many poets...write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
strong writing thinking
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
fall heart writing
Most poets, most good poets even, no longer have the heart to write about what is most terrible in the world of the present: the bombs waiting beside the rockets, the hundreds of millions staring into the temporary shelter of their television sets, the decline of the West that seems less a decline than the fall preceding an explosion.
adjusted environment president
President Robbins was so well adjusted to his environment that sometimes you could not tell which was the environment and which was President Robbins.
became clay dirty dressed future housewives pine red southern stare
The Southern past, the Southern present, the Southern future became one of red clay pine barrens, of chain-gang camps, of housewives dressed in flour sacks who stare all day dully down into dirty sinks.
american-poet partisan paul review thinks
He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors.
except feels united
In the United States, there one feels free... Except from the Americans - but every pearl has its oyster.
entertain home life rest
It is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life
blind date stood
The blind date that has stood you up: your life.