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 The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

More quotes by Randall Jarrell

Poetry and the Age (1953)

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

Poetry and the Age (1953)

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

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

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