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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.

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
Success
Poet
Brilliantly
Best
Usually
Thomas
Nothing
Poetry
Texture
Good
Pieces
Dylan
Would
Worst
Poems
Alive
Hardly
Written
Essential
Less
Essentials

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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Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
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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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Many poets write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
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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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whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.
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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.
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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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Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.
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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.
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.
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Christina Stead has a Chinese say, Our old age is perhaps life's decision about us or, worse, the decision we have made about ourselves without ever realizing we were making it.
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The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
Randall Jarrell
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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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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.
Randall Jarrell
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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.
Randall Jarrell
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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.
Randall Jarrell
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When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
Randall Jarrell
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Goethe said that the worst thing in art is technical facility accompanied by triteness. Many an artist, like God, has never needed to think twice about anything. His works are the mad scene from Giselle , on ice skates: he weeps, pulls out his hair holding his wrists like Lifar and tells you what Life is, all at a gliding forty miles an hour.
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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.
Randall Jarrell