Quote

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

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
World
Wrong
Parnassus
True
Parted
Beautiful
Poem
Look
Tells
Looks
Lips
Heart
Road
Make
Direct
Good
Pure

More quotes by Randall Jarrell

Image
Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
Randall Jarrell
Image
there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.
Randall Jarrell
Image
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
Image
A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.
Randall Jarrell
Image
One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.
Randall Jarrell
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Many poets write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
Randall Jarrell
Image
Our universities should produce good criticism they do not or, at best, they do so only as federal prisons produce counterfeit money: a few hardened prisoners are more or less surreptitiously continuing their real vocations.
Randall Jarrell
Image
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
Image
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
Image
One of the most puzzling things about a novel is that the way it really was half the time is, and half the time isn't, the way it ought to be in the novel.
Randall Jarrell
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.
Randall Jarrell
Image
The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
Randall Jarrell
Image
The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.
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
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.
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