Quote #46

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 have so much of one, or one so obdurate that you can say of it, 'It is a style that no subject can change.'

More from Randall Jarrell

  1. Many young poets, nowadays, are insured against everything. For them poetry is a game like court tennis or squash racquets - one they learn…
  2. 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…
  3. 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 sayin…
  4. When you call people we you find it easy to be unfair to them, since you yourself are included in the condemnation.
  5. Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we shall know everyth…
  6. The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
  7. A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental wh…
  8. 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 …

All Randall Jarrell quotes