Quote

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.

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
Made
Turning
Sofas
Make
Consider
Observer
Things
Poet
Upside
Reader
Observers
Looking
Rhetoric
Interesting
Considering
Curiously
Around
Protest
Fooling
Enough
Poets
Sofa

More quotes by Randall Jarrell

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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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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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If wishes were stories, beggars would read.
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Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen.
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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 dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.
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People had always seemed to Gertrude rather like the beasts in Animal Farm : all equally detestable, but some more equally detestable than others.
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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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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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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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If you've been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place.
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A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.
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there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.
Randall Jarrell
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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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When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
Randall Jarrell
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The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.
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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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Many poets write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
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Goethe said, The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing Somerset Maugham says that the finest compliment he ever received was a letter in which one of his readers said: I read your novel without having to look up a single word in the dictionary. These writers, plainly, lived in different worlds.
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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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