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Quotes from The Third Book of Criticism — Randall Jarrell

1914–1965 United States

← All quotes by Randall Jarrell

22 quotes

The weight and concentration of the poems fall upon things (and those great things, animals and people), in their tough, laconic, un-get-pastable plainness: they have kept the stolid and dangerous inertia of the objects of the sagas — the sword that snaps, the man looking at his lopped-off leg and saying, “That was a good stroke.”

The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

Many a writer has spent his life putting his favorite words in all the places they belong; but how many, like [E.E.] Cummings, have spent their lives putting their favorite words in all the places they don’t belong, thus discovering many effects that no one had even realized were possible?

The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Randall Jarrell (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.