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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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Randall Jarrell
Age: 51 †
Born: 1914
Born: May 6
Died: 1965
Died: October 14
Journalist
Literary Critic
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Nashville
Tennessee
Matter
Poets
Would
Clarity
Poet
Habit
Reading
Help
Helping
Doe
Obscurity

More quotes by Randall Jarrell

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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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When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
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Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.
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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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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.
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The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
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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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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.
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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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Most works of art are, necessarily, bad... one suffers through the many for the few.
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Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen.
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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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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.
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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.
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whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.
Randall Jarrell
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The safest way to avoid the world is through art and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art.
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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
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Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?
Randall Jarrell
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there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.
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If you've been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place.
Randall Jarrell