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Most works of art are, necessarily, bad... one suffers through the many for the few.

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
Suffers
Necessarily
Works
Suffering
Art
Many

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Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen.
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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.
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whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.
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Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so.
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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.
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The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.
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Many poets write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
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I shook myself I was dreaming. As I went to bed the words of the eighth-grade class's teacher, when the class got to Evangeline , kept echoing in my ears: We're coming to a long poem now, boys and girls. Now don't be babies and start counting the pages. I lay there like a baby, counting the pages over and over, counting the pages.
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The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
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One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.
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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.
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Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
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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 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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Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?
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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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When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
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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.
Randall Jarrell
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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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there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.
Randall Jarrell