Randall Jarrell

How can we expect

How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel? Randall Jarrell

The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces. Randall Jarrell

First one gets works

First one gets works of art, then criticism of them, then criticism of the criticism, and, finally, a book on The Literary Situation , a book which tells you all about writers, critics, publishing, paperbacked books, the tendencies of the (literary) time, what sells and how much, what writers wear and drink and want, what … Read more

We always tend to

We always tend to distrust geniuses about genius, as if what they say didn’t arouse much empathy in us, or as if we were waiting till some more reliable source of information came along… Randall Jarrell

We read our mail

We read our mail and counted up our missions In bombers named for girls, we burned The cities we had learned about in school Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among The people we had killed and never seen. When we lasted long enough they gave us medals; When we died they said, … Read more

Underneath all his writing

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 … Read more

In Heaven all reviews

In Heaven all reviews will be favorable; here on earth, the publisher realizes, plausibility demands an occasional bad one, some convincing lump in all that leaven, and he accepts it somewhat as a theologian accepts Evil. Randall Jarrell

Both in verse and

Both in verse and in prose [Karl] Shapiro loves, partly out of indignation and partly out of sheer mischievousness, to tell the naked truths or half-truths or quarter-truths that will make anybody’s hair stand on end; he is always crying: “But he hasn’t any clothes on!” about an emperor who is half the time surprisingly … Read more

I shook myself; I

I shook myself; I was dreaming. As I went to bed the words of the eighth-grade class’s teacher, when the class got to Evangeline , kept echoing in my ears: “We’re coming to a long poem now, boys and girls. Now don’t be babies and start counting the pages.” I lay there like a baby, … Read more

An author frequently chooses

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