Quote

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.

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
Sun
Suns
Grow
Rains
Grows
Replaced
Small
Disappear
Culture
Changing
Whole
Climate
Great
Rain
Things
Species

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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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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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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.
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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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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 novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with 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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One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.
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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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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 people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
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whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.
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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 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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A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.
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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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