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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
Art
Many
Suffers
Necessarily
Works
Suffering

More quotes by Randall Jarrell

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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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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.
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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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Many poets write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
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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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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
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The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.
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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.
Randall Jarrell
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Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
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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.
Randall Jarrell
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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.
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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The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
Randall Jarrell
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Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
Randall Jarrell
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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
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The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.
Randall Jarrell
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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.
Randall Jarrell
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Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.
Randall Jarrell
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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
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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