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
way speak forget
a poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it...
rain culture sun
The climate of our culture is changing. Under these new rains, new suns, small things grow great, and what was great grows small; whole species disappear and are replaced.
process persons
A person is a process, one that leads to death...
cutting thinking long-ago
I think Miss Moore was right to cut "The Steeple-Jack" the poem seems plainer and clearer in its shortened state but she has cut too much... The reader may feel like saying, "Let her do as she pleases with the poem; it's hers, isn't it?" No; it's much too good a poem for that, it long ago became everybody's, and we can protest just as we could if Donatello cut off David's left leg.
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.
intelligent dozen honest
If we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a hundred, we say they aren't like politicians at all, and our category of politicians stays unchanged; we know what politicians are like.
oysters pearls
Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
home ideas rest-of-your-life
It is better to entertain an idea than to take home to live with you for the rest of your life.
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.
crafts narrative length
The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.
time real war
The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
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.