Randall Jarrell Zitate (215 Zitate, seite 3)

precedes by twelve years Truman Capote’s putdown of Jack Kerouac: “That isn’t writing at all, it’s typing.”; “from Verse Chronicle”, p. 137
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“New Directions is a reviewer’s nightmare; it’s enough punishment to read it all, without writing about it too.”

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Randall Jarrell

In All Directions”, p. 87
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“An intelligent man said that the world felt Napoleon as a weight, and that when he died it would give a great oof of relief. This is just as true of Byron, or of such Byrons of their days as Kipling and Hemingway: after a generation or two the world is tired of being their pedestal, shakes them of with an oof, and then—hoisting onto its back a new world-figure—feels the penetrating satisfaction of having made a mistake all its own.”

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Randall Jarrell

“On Preparing to Read Kipling”, pp. 116–117
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

“…I simply don’t want the poems mixed up with my life or opinions or picture or any other regrettable concomitants. I look like a bear and live in a cave; but you should worry.”

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Randall Jarrell

of not wanting to write a preface for his first volume of verse, The Rage for the Lost Penny (1940); “A Note on Poetry”, p. 47
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“The writer does not get from his work as he writes and reads it the same aesthetic shock that the reader does; and since the writer is so accustomed to reading other stories, and having them produce a decided effect upon him, he is disquieted at not being equally affected by his own.”

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Randall Jarrell

"Ten Books," The Southern Review (Autumn 1935) [p. 8]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“One of the most puzzling things about a novel is that “the way it really was” half the time is, and half the time isn’t, the way it ought to be in the novel.”

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Randall Jarrell

“An Unread Book”, p. 46
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“A poem is sort of an onion of contexts, and you can no more locate any of the important meanings exclusively in a part than you can locate a relation in one of its terms. The signiﬁcance of a part may be greatly modified or even in extreme cases completely reversed by later and larger parts and by the whole.”

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Randall Jarrell

“Texts from Housman”, p. 21
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“The weight and concentration of the poems fall upon things (and those great things, animals and people), in their tough, laconic, un-get-pastable plainness: they have kept the stolid and dangerous inertia of the objects of the sagas—the sword that snaps, the man looking at his lopped-off leg and saying, “That was a good stroke.””

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Randall Jarrell

“Freud to Paul: The Stages of Auden’s Ideology”, p. 155
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“Some of Mr. Gregory’s poems have merely appeared in The New Yorker; others are New Yorker poems: the inclusive topicality, the informed and casual smartness, the flat fashionable irony, meaningless because it proceeds from a frame of reference whose amorphous superiority is the most definite thing about it—they are the trademark not simply of a magazine but of a class.”

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Randall Jarrell

“Town Mouse, Country Mouse”, p. 70
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“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.”

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Randall Jarrell

Quoted in Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "Books of the Times," The New York Times (6 May 1985) http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D00E0D7173BF935A35756C0A963948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all. The quote is cited from a 1952 letter in Randall Jarrell's Letters: An Autobiographical and Literary Selection, ed. Mary Jarrell, assisted by Stuart Wright (Houghton Mifflin, 1985). <br class="br">General sources

“[Kenneth Patchen] has a real, but disorganized, self-indulgent, but rather commonplace talent.
This is not Mr. Patchen’s opinion of himself. (Nor is it that of William Carlos Williams, who almost invents a new language, a kind of system of emotional nonsense syllables, in his effort to praise Mr. Patchen properly. For instance, Mr. Patchen is “a hawk on the grave of John Donne.” I should have called him a parrot on the stones of half a cemetery.)”

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Randall Jarrell

“Poetry in a Dry Season”, p. 35
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“A few months ago I read an interview with a critic; a well-known critic; an unusually humane and intelligent critic. The interviewer had just said that the critic “sounded like a happy man”, and the interview was drawing to a close; the critic said, ending it all: “I read, but I don’t get any time to read at whim. All the reading I do is in order to write or teach, and I resent it. We have no TV, and I don’t listen to the radio or records, or go to art galleries or the theater. I’m a completely negative personality.”
As I thought of that busy, artless life—no records, no paintings, no plays, no books except those you lecture on or write articles about—I was so depressed that I went back over the interview looking for some bright spot, and I found it, one beautiful sentence: for a moment I had left the gray, dutiful world of the professional critic, and was back in the sunlight and shadow, the unconsidered joys, the unreasoned sorrows, of ordinary readers and writers, amateurishly reading and writing “at whim”. The critic said that once a year he read Kim, it was plain, at whim: not to teach, not to criticize, just for love—he read it, as Kipling wrote it, just because he liked to, wanted to, couldn’t help himself. To him it wasn’t a means to a lecture or an article, it was an end; he read it not for anything he could get out of it, but for itself. And isn’t this what the work of art demands of us? The work of art, Rilke said, says to us always: You must change your life. It demands of us that we too see things as ends, not as means—that we too know them and love them for their own sake. This change is beyond us, perhaps, during the active, greedy, and powerful hours of our lives, but during the contemplative and sympathetic hours of our reading, our listening, our looking, it is surely within our power, if we choose to make it so, if we choose to let one part of our nature follow its natural desires. So I say to you, for a closing sentence: Read at whim! read at whim!”

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Randall Jarrell

“Poets, Critics, and Readers”, pp. 112–113
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

“Stevens’s poetry makes one understand how valuable it can be for a poet to write a great deal. Not too much of that great deal, ever, is good poetry; but out of quantity can come practice, naturalness, accustomed mastery, adaptations and elaborations and reversals of old ways, new ways, even—so that the poet can put into the poems, at the end of a lifetime, what the end of a lifetime brings him. Stevens has learned to write at will, for pleasure; his methods of writing, his ways of imagining, have made this possible for him as it is impossible for many living poets—Eliot, for instance. Anything can be looked at, felt about, meditated upon, so Stevens can write about anything; he does not demand of his poems the greatest concentration, intensity, dramatic immediacy, the shattering and inexplicable rightness the poet calls inspiration.”

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Randall Jarrell

“The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p. 65
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“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.”

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Randall Jarrell

"Answers to Questions," from Mid-Century American Poets, edited by John Ciardi, 1950 [p. 171]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

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

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Randall Jarrell

“Reflections on Wallace Stevens”, p. 129
Poetry and the Age (1953)

“The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.”

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Randall Jarrell

"The Taste of the Age," The Saturday Evening Post (1958-07-26) [p. 290]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“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.””

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Randall Jarrell

These writers, plainly, lived in different worlds.
"The Obscurity of the Poet", p. 13
No Other Book: Selected Essays (1999)