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

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The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
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Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
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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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Most works of art are, necessarily, bad... one suffers through the many for the few.
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Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
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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 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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When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
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The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.
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there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.
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A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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It is better to entertain an idea than to take home to live with you for the rest of your life.
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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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Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.
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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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