Quote #56

What he could do in poetry he did early and with prodigious security; he was one of our true poets for thirty years and practically the only American poet able to cope with the Second Great War; many of us both younger and older would acknowledge him as a master in one degree or another. It was this gift of true pitch that made his teaching voice, his critical voice, as penetrating as it was.

More from Randall Jarrell

  1. Your tenderness and terrorization, your prose sentences - like Bernini graves, staggeringly expensive, Italianate, warm, sentences once-and…
  2. Randall had a great flair for the poetry of desperation.
  3. His dogmatism is more wild and personal than we are accustomed to, completely unspoiled by the hedging 'equanimity' that weakens the style …
  4. To have your poems criticized by Jarrell - when they didn't please him - was like meeting your fate, like a foretaste of death. To go with …
  5. I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetr…
  6. You often feel about something in Shakespeare or Dostoevsky that nobody ever said such a thing, but it's just the sort of thing people woul…
  7. A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.
  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