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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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The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
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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.
Randall Jarrell
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Most works of art are, necessarily, bad... one suffers through the many for the few.
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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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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.
Randall Jarrell
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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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there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.
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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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The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.
Randall Jarrell
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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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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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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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whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.
Randall Jarrell
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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.
Randall Jarrell
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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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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
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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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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.
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