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Many poets write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
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
Poet
Simply
Write
Many
Melancholia
Writing
Cure
Poets
Cures
More quotes by Randall Jarrell
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
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
whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.
Randall Jarrell
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
Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.
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 you look at the world with parted lips and a pure heart, and will the good, won't that make a true and beautiful poem? One's heart tells one that it will and one's heart is wrong. There is no direct road to Parnassus.
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
A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.
Randall Jarrell
An author frequently chooses solemn or overwhelming subjects to write about he is so impressed at writing about Life and Death that he does not notice that he is saying nothing of the slightest importance about either.
Randall Jarrell
The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.
Randall Jarrell
One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.
Randall Jarrell
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
If you've been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place.
Randall Jarrell
The safest way to avoid the world is through art and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art.
Randall Jarrell
The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
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
The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.
Randall Jarrell
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?
Randall Jarrell
It is better to entertain an idea than to take home to live with you for the rest of your life.
Randall Jarrell
