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
except feels free pearl united
In the United States, there one feels free . . . Except from the Americans - but every pearl has its oyster.
blind date stood
The blind date that has stood you up: your life.
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
except feels united
In the United States, there one feels free... Except from the Americans - but every pearl has its oyster.
american-poet partisan paul review thinks
He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors.
equality long enough
If you've been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place.
birthday yellow people
The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
reading air faithful
[Robert] Frost says in a piece of homely doggerel that he has hoped wisdom could be not only Attic but Laconic, Boeotian even "at least not systematic"; but how systematically Frostian the worst of his later poems are! His good poems are the best refutation of, the most damning comment on, his bad: his Complete Poems have the air of being able to educate any faithful reader into tearing out a third of the pages, reading a third, and practically wearing out the rest.
way half novel
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.
discovery vets done
originality" is everyone's aim, and novel techniques are as much prized as new scientific discoveries. [T.S.] Eliot states it with surprising naïveté: "It is exactly as wasteful for a poet to do what has been done already as for a biologist to rediscover Mendel's discoveries.
clothes hair naked
Both in verse and in prose [Karl] Shapiro loves, partly out of indignation and partly out of sheer mischievousness, to tell the naked truths or half-truths or quarter-truths that will make anybody's hair stand on end; he is always crying: "But he hasn't any clothes on!" about an emperor who is half the time surprisingly well-dressed.
reading doe obscurity
If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help.
attitude doubt might
There are some good things and some fantastic ones in Auden's early attitude; if the reader calls it a muddle I shall acquiesce, with the remark that the later position might be considered a more rarefied muddle. But poets rather specialize in muddles and I have no doubt which of the muddles was better for Auden's poetry: one was fertile and usable, the other decidedly is not. Auden sometimes seems to be saying with Henry Clay, "I had rather be right than poetry"; but I am not sure, then, that he is either.
class magazines irony
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.