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...modern poetry is necessarily obscure; if the reader can’t get it, let him eat Browning...

— Randall Jarrell The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

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Poetry

More quotes by Randall Jarrell

One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.

Poetry and the Age (1953)

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)

Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.

Poetry and the Age (1953)

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)

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There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity...but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

George Chapman Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Michael Faraday

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Randall Jarrell (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.