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Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
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
Every
Oyster
Oysters
Pearl
Pearls
Except
Americans
More quotes by Randall Jarrell
The usual bad poem in somebody's Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and little emptier than, brushing one's teeth.
Randall Jarrell
whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.
Randall Jarrell
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.
Randall Jarrell
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.
Randall Jarrell
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.
Randall Jarrell
If poetry were nothing but texture, [Dylan] Thomas would be as good as any poet alive. The what of his poems is hardly essential to their success, and the best and most brilliantly written pieces usually say less than the worst.
Randall Jarrell
Most works of art are, necessarily, bad... one suffers through the many for the few.
Randall Jarrell
The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.
Randall Jarrell
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.
Randall Jarrell
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.
Randall Jarrell
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.
Randall Jarrell
Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.
Randall Jarrell
The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces.
Randall Jarrell
Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?
Randall Jarrell
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.
Randall Jarrell
If wishes were stories, beggars would read.
Randall Jarrell
Many poets write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
Randall Jarrell
Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
Randall Jarrell
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
Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen.
Randall Jarrell
