Quote

Many poets write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.

Randall Jarrell

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Randall Jarrell
Age: 51 †
Born: 1914
Born: May 6
Died: 1965
Died: October 14
Journalist
Literary Critic
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Nashville
Tennessee
Write
Many
Writing
Melancholia
Cure
Poets
Cures
Poet
Simply

More quotes by Randall Jarrell

Image
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
Image
When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
Randall Jarrell
Image
whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.
Randall Jarrell
Image
Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.
Randall Jarrell
Image
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.
Randall Jarrell
Image
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
Image
Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
Randall Jarrell
Image
One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.
Randall Jarrell
Image
Most works of art are, necessarily, bad... one suffers through the many for the few.
Randall Jarrell
Image
there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.
Randall Jarrell
Image
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.
Randall Jarrell
Image
A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.
Randall Jarrell
Image
Goethe said that the worst thing in art is technical facility accompanied by triteness. Many an artist, like God, has never needed to think twice about anything. His works are the mad scene from Giselle , on ice skates: he weeps, pulls out his hair holding his wrists like Lifar and tells you what Life is, all at a gliding forty miles an hour.
Randall Jarrell
Image
People had always seemed to Gertrude rather like the beasts in Animal Farm : all equally detestable, but some more equally detestable than others.
Randall Jarrell
Image
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
Image
It is better to entertain an idea than to take home to live with you for the rest of your life.
Randall Jarrell
Image
If you've been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place.
Randall Jarrell
Image
Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself.
Randall Jarrell
Image
We always tend to distrust geniuses about genius, as if what they say didn't arouse much empathy in us, or as if we were waiting till some more reliable source of information came along...
Randall Jarrell
Image
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.
Randall Jarrell