1
I see at last that all the knowledge I wrung from the darkness–that the 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
2
A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.Randall Jarrell
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From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.Randall Jarrell
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It's ugly, but is it art?Randall Jarrell
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When I was young and miserable and pretty And poor, I'd wish What all girls wish: to have a husband, A house and children. Now that I'm old, my wish Is womanish: That the boy putting groceries in my car See me.Randall Jarrell
6
Ruskin says that anyone who expects perfection from a work of art knows nothing of works of art. This is an appealing sentence that, so far as I can see, is not true about a few pictures and statues and pieces of music, short stories and short poems. Whether or not you expect perfection from them, you get it; at least, there is nothing in them that you would want changed. But what Ruskin says is true about novels: anyone who expects perfection from even the greatest novel knows nothing of novels. .Randall Jarrell
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The cat's asleep; I whisper "kitten"Till he stirs a little and begins to purr-- He doesn't wake. Today out on the limb( The limb he thinks he can't climb down from) He mewed until I heard him in the house. I climbed up to get him down: he mewed. What he says and what he sees are limited. My own response is even more constricted. I think, "It's lucky; what you have is too." What do you have except--well, me? I joke about it but it's not a joke; The house and I are all he remembers. Next month how will he guess that it is winter And not just entropy, the universe Plunging at last into its cold decline? I cannot think of him without a pang. Poor rumpled thing, why don't you see That you have no more, really, than a man? Men aren't happy; why are you? .Randall Jarrell
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There is something essentially ridiculous about critics, anyway: what is good is good without our saying so, and beneath all our majesty we know this.Randall Jarrell
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More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader and would no more read a book alone if they could help it than have a baby alone.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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One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.Randall Jarrell
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Ezra Pound - idiosyncrasy on a monument.Randall Jarrell
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The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.Randall Jarrell
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A good poet is someone who manages in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms to be struck by lightning five or six times.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.Randall Jarrell