Quote #58

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 his daunting judgement, he had an unlimited stock of images for catching exactly each poet's inadequacies, so that their predicaments were far more vividly expressed than anything they themselves had written. Jarrell made literature out of their failure to make it.

More from Randall Jarrell

  1. Randall had a great flair for the poetry of desperation.
  2. 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 onl…
  3. Your tenderness and terrorization, your prose sentences - like Bernini graves, staggeringly expensive, Italianate, warm, sentences once-and…
  4. His dogmatism is more wild and personal than we are accustomed to, completely unspoiled by the hedging 'equanimity' that weakens the style …
  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