16 Quotes & Sayings By Randall Jarrell

Randall Jarrell was born in 1915, the son of a Baptist minister. As a child, Jarrell was a precocious poet and writer. He published his first poem at age eight and his first poem, "The Rose," won a prize from a small magazine called "The Southern Review." Jarrell attended Swarthmore College, where he wrote a short story for each of his college courses. He earned his B.A Read more

in 1936 and then served in the U.S. Army during World War II. After the war he earned an M.A.

in English from Columbia University and began writing poetry for magazines such as The New Yorker, Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, The Atlantic Monthly ,and Kenyon Review .

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
A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime...
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
3
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
4
It's ugly, but is it art? Randall Jarrell
5
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
7
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
8
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
9
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
10
The dark uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed. Randall Jarrell
11
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
12
Ezra Pound - idiosyncrasy on a monument. Randall Jarrell
13
The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it. Randall Jarrell
14
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
15
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