Quote

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

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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
Somebody
Valued
Littles
Usual
Little
Poem
Teeth
Careful
Emptier
Habit
Mannered
Works
Brushing
Learned
Collected

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The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.
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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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whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.
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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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Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?
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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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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.
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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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The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
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When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
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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.
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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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We always tend to distrust geniuses about genius, as if what they say didn't arouse much empathy in us, or as if we were waiting till some more reliable source of information came along...
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If you've been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place.
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The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
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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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One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.
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Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen.
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One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.
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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.
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