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Randall Jarrell Quotes about Writing

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Most poets, most good poets even, no longer have the heart to write about what is most terrible in the world of the present: the bombs waiting beside the rockets, the hundreds of millions staring into the temporary

Most poets, most good poets even, no longer have the heart to write about what is most terrible in the world of the present: the bombs waiting beside the rockets, the hundreds of millions staring into the temporary shelter of their television sets, the decline of the West that seems less a decline than the fall preceding an explosion.

Randall Jarrell
Fall, Writing, Heart
"The Third Book of Criticism". Book by Randall Jarrell, "Fifty Years of American Poetry", pp. 332 - 333, 1969.

Many poets write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.

Randall Jarrell
Writing, Poet, Cures
"Poetry and the Age". Book by Randall Jarrell. Chapter: "A Verse Chronicle", p. 149, 1953.

whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.

Randall Jarrell
Writing, Poet
"Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964". Book by Randall Jarrell, "Recent Poetry" (p. 227), 1980.

Early in his life Mr. [Ezra] Pound met with strong, continued, and unintelligent opposition. If people keep opposing you when you are right, you think them fools; and after a time, right or wrong, you think them fools simply because they oppose you. Similarly, you write true things or good things, and end by thinking things true or good simply because you write them

Randall Jarrell
Strong, Writing, Thinking
"Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964". Book by Randall Jarrell, "Poets: Old, New, and Aging" (p. 44), 1980.

Imagism was a reductio ad absurdum of one or two tendencies of romanticism, such a beautifully and finally absurd one that it is hard to believe it existed as anything but a logical construction; and what imagist found it possible to go on writing imagist poetry? A number of poets have stopped writing entirely; others, like recurring decimals, repeat the novelties they commeced with, each time less valuably than before. And there are surrealist poetry, and political poetry, and all the othe refuges of the indigent.

Randall Jarrell
Believe, Writing, Two
"Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964". Book by Randall Jarrell, "A Note on Poetry" (p. 50), 1980.

A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry.

Randall Jarrell
Writing, Successful, People
"Mid-Century American Poets". Book by John Ciardi, "Answers to Questions" (p. 171), 1950.

Underneath all his writing there is the settled determination to use certain words, to take certain attitudes, to produce a certain atmosphere; what he is seeing or thinking or feeling has hardly any influence on the way he writes. The reader can reply, ironically, "That's what it means to have a style"; but few people have so much of one, or one so obdurate that you can say of it, "It is a style that no subject can change.

Randall Jarrell
Determination, Attitude, Writing
"Recent Poetry," The Yale Review (p. 237), 1955.

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
Writing, Life And Death, Doe
"Ten Books", The Southern Review (p. 9), 1935.

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