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Quotes from Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 — Randall Jarrell

1914–1965 United States

← All quotes by Randall Jarrell

46 quotes

The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

If we judge by wealth and power, our times are the best of times; if the times have made us willing to judge by wealth and power, they are the worst of times.

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise; a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

When you call people we you find it easy to be unfair to them, since you yourself are included in the condemnation.

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

New Directions is a reviewer’s nightmare; it’s enough punishment to read it all, without writing about it too.

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Let’s say this together: “Great me no greats”, and leave this grading to posterity.

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Most works of art are, necessarily, bad...; one suffers through the many for the few.

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

A good religious poem, today, is ambergris, and it is hard to enjoy it for thinking of all those suffering whales; but martyrs are born, not made.

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

One is forced to remember how far from "self-expression" great poems are — what a strange compromise between the demands of the self, the world, and Poetry they actually represent.

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

This sort of admission of error, of change, makes us trust a critic as nothing else but omniscience could...

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Oscar Williams’s new book is pleasanter and a little quieter than his old, which gave the impression of having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter.

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Malraux writes in a language in which there is no way to say "perhaps" or "I don't know," so that after a while we grow accustomed to saying it for him.

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

...there is in this world no line so bad that someone won’t someday copy it.

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Compare the saint who, asked what he would do if he had only an hour to live, replied that he would go on with his game of chess, since it was as much worship as anything else he had ever done.

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Marx said that he had stood Hegel on his head; often Mr. [Horace] Gregory has simply stood Pollyana on her head.

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

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.

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

If you look at the world with parted lips and a pure heart, and will the good, won't that make a true and beautiful poem? One's heart tells one that it will; and one's heart is wrong. There is no direct road to Parnassus.

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

If poetry were nothing but texture, [Dylan] Thomas would be as good as any poet alive. The what of his poems is hardly essential to their success, and the best and most brilliantly written pieces usually say less than the worst.

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Everybody must have wished at some time that poetry were written by nice ordinary people instead of poets — and, in a better world, it may be; but in this world writers like Constance Carrier are the well oysters that don’t have the pearls.

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Attribution

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