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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.

Randall Jarrell

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Randall Jarrell
Age: 51 †
Born: 1914
Born: May 6
Died: 1965
Died: October 14
Journalist
Literary Critic
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Nashville
Tennessee
Thinking
Definitions
Nine
Poetry
Modern
Possible
Tenths
Read
Idolatry
Culture
Intellectuals
Think
Definition

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Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?
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The best of causes ruins as quickly as the worst and the road to Limbo is paved with writers who have done everything I am being sympathetic, not satiric for the very best reasons.
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there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.
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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.
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Most works of art are, necessarily, bad... one suffers through the many for the few.
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Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
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Most people don't listen to classical music at all, but to rock-and-roll or hillbilly songs or some album named Music To Listen To Music By.
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When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
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Our universities should produce good criticism they do not or, at best, they do so only as federal prisons produce counterfeit money: a few hardened prisoners are more or less surreptitiously continuing their real vocations.
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Christina Stead has a Chinese say, Our old age is perhaps life's decision about us or, worse, the decision we have made about ourselves without ever realizing we were making it.
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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.
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One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.
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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.
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It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.
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If wishes were stories, beggars would read.
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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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If you've been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place.
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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.
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Few poets have made a more interesting rhetoric out of just fooling around: turning things upside down, looking at them from under the sofa, considering them (and their observer) curiously enough to make the reader protest, That were to consider it too curiously.
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How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel?
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