Randall Jarrell

"Gertrude Johnson could feel no real respect for, no real interest in, anybody who wasn't a writer. For her there were two species: writers and people; and the writers were really people, and the people weren't."

"The Southern past, the Southern present, the Southern future, concentrated into Gertrude's voice, became one of red clay pine-barrens, of chain-gang camps, of housewives dressed in flour sacks who stare all day dully down into dirty sinks."

"Age could not wither nor custom stale her infinite monotony: in fact, neither Age nor Custom could do anything (as they said, their voices rising) with the American novelist Gertrude Johnson."

"...to Americans English manners are far more frightening than none at all..."

"...the really damned not only like Hell, they feel loyal to it..."

"We were given drinks, and drank them, and talked while we drank them. But talked, here, is a euphemism: we had that conversation about how you make a Martini. The people in Hell, Dr. Rosenbaum had told me once, say nothing but What? Americans in Hell tell each other how to make Martinis."

"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?"

"She would have come from Paradise and complained to God that the apple wasn’t a winesap at all, but a great big pulpy Washington Delicious; and after the Ark she would have said that there had not been the animals, the spring rains, and the nice long ocean-voyage the prospectus from the travel agency had led her to expect — and that she had been most disappointed at not finding on Mount Ararat Prometheus."

"President Robbins was so well adjusted to his environment that sometimes you could not tell which was the environment and which was President Robbins."

"Mrs. Robbins asked: “If I am not for myself, who then is for me?” — and she was for herself so passionately that the other people in the world decided that they were not going to let Pamela Robbins beat them at her own game, and stopped playing."

"...and then President Robbins began to speak. After two sentences one realized once more that President Robbins was an extraordinary speaker, a speaker of a — one says an almost extinct school, but how does one say the opposite? a not-yet-evolved school? He did something so logical that it is impossibe that no one else should have thought of it, yet no one has. President Robbins crooned his speeches. His voice not only took you into his confidence, it laid a fire for you and put your slippers by it and then went into the other room to get into something more comfortable. It was a Compromising voice."

"From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose."

"For this last savior, man, I have lied as I lie now. But what is lying? Men wash their hands in blood, as best they can: I find no fault in this just man."

"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, "Our casualties were low." They said, "Here are the maps"; we burned the cities."

"The soul has no assignments, neither cooks Nor referees: it wastes its time. It wastes its time. Here in this enclave there are centuries For you to waste: the short and narrow stream Of life meanders into a thousand valleys Of all that was, or might have been, or is to be. The books, just leafed through, whisper endlessly."

"The ways we miss our lives are life."

"Somewhere there must be Something that's different from everything. All that I've never thought of — think of me!"

"His eye a ring inside a ring inside a ring That leers up, joyless, vile, in meek obscenity — This is the devil. Flesh to flesh, he bleats The herd back to the pit of being."

"Death and the devil, what are these to him? His being accuses him — and yet his face is firm In resolution, in absolute persistence; The folds of smiling do for steadiness; The face is its own fate — a man does what he must — And the body underneath it says: I am."

"When I was asked to talk about the Obscurity of the Modern Poet I was delighted, for I have suffered from this obscurity all my life. But then I realized that I was being asked to talk not about the fact that people don’t read poetry, but about the fact that most of them wouldn’t understand it if they did: about the difficulty, not the neglect, of contemporary poetry. And yet it is not just modern poetry, but poetry, that is today obscure. Paradise Lost is what it was; but the ordinary reader no longer makes the mistake of trying to read it — instead he glances at it, weighs it in his hand, shudders, and suddenly, his eyes shining, puts it on his list of the ten dullest books he has ever read, along with Moby-Dick, War and Peace, Faust, and Boswell’s Life of Johnson. But I am doing this ordinary reader an injustice: it was not the Public, nodding over its lunch-pail, but the educated reader, the reader the universities have trained, who a few weeks ago, to the Public’s sympathetic delight, put together this list of the world’s dullest books. Since most people know about the modern poet only that he is obscure — i.e., that he is difficult, i.e., that he is neglected — they naturally make a causal connection between the two meanings of the word, and decide that he is unread because he is difficult. Some of the time this is true: the poet seems difficult because he is not read, because the reader is not accustomed to reading his or any other poetry."

"If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help."

"How poet and public stared at each other with righteous indignation, till the poet said, “Since you won’t read me, I’ll make sure you can’t” — is one of the most complicated and interesting of stories."

"If my tone is mocking, the tone of someone accustomed to helplessness, this is natural: the poet is a condemned man for whom the State will not even buy breakfast — and as someone said, “If you’re going to hang me, you mustn’t expect to be able to intimidate me into sparing your feelings during the execution.”"

"Goethe said, “The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing”; Somerset Maugham says that the finest compliment he ever received was a letter in which one of his readers said: “I read your novel without having to look up a single word in the dictionary.” These writers, plainly, lived in different worlds."

"Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself."

"Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence."

"People always ask: For whom does the poet write? He needs only to answer, For whom do you do good? Are you kind to your daughter because in the end someone will pay you for being?... The poet writes his poem for its own sake, for the sake of that order of things in which the poem takes the place that has awaited it."

"I don’t need to praise anything so justly famous as Frost’s observation of and empathy with everything in Nature from a hornet to a hillside; and he has observed his own nature, one person’s random or consequential chains of thoughts and feelings and perceptions, quite as well. (And this person, in the poems, is not the “alienated artist” cut off from everybody who isn’t, yum-yum, another alienated artist; he is someone like normal people only more so — a normal person in the less common and more important sense of normal.)"

"This poet is now, most of the time, an elder statesman like Baruch or Smuts, full of complacent wisdom and cast-iron whimsy. But of course there was always a good deal of this in the official rôle that Frost created for himself; one imagines Yeats saying about Frost, as Sarah Bernhardt said about Nijinsky: “I fear, I greatly fear, that I have just seen the greatest actor in the world.” Sometimes it is this public figure, this official rôle — the Only Genuine Robert Frost in Captivity — that writes the poems, and not the poet himself; and then one gets a self-made man’s political editorials, full of cracker-box philosophizing, almanac joke-cracking — of a snake-oil salesman’s mysticism; one gets the public figure’s relishing consciousness of himself, an astonishing constriction of imagination and sympathy; one gets sentimentality and whimsicality; an arch complacency, a complacent archness; and one gets Homely Wisdom till the cows come home."

"Frost says in a piece of homely doggerel that he has hoped wisdom could be not only Attic but Laconic, Boeotian even — “at least not systematic”; but how systematically Frostian the worst of his later poems are! His good poems are the best refutation of, the most damning comment on, his bad: his Complete Poems have the air of being able to educate any faithful reader into tearing out a third of the pages, reading a third, and practically wearing out the rest."

"Taking the chance of making a complete fool of himself — and, sometimes, doing so — is the first demand that is made upon any real critic: he must stick his neck out just as the artist does, if he is to be of any real use to art."

"As Blake said, there is no competition between true poets."

"One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world."

"Poetry is a bad medium for philosophy. Everything in the philosophical poem has to satisfy irreconcilable requirements: for instance, the last demand that we should make of philosophy (that it be interesting) is the first we make of a poem; the philosophical poet has an elevated and methodical, but forlorn and absurd air as he works away at his flying tank, his sewing-machine that also plays the piano."

"When you’re young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in."

"All his tunk-a-tunks, his hoo-goo-boos — those mannered, manufactured, individual, uninteresting little sound-inventions — how typical they are of the lecture-style of the English philosopher, who makes grunts or odd noises, uses homely illustrations, and quotes day in and day out from Alice, in order to give what he says some appearance of that raw reality it so plainly and essentially lacks. These “tootings at the wedding of the soul” are fun for the tooter, but get as dreary for the reader as do all the foreign words — a few of these are brilliant, a few more pleasant, and the rest a disaster: “one cannot help deploring his too extensive acquaintance with the foreign languages”, as Henry James said, of Walt Whitman, to Edith Wharton."

"It is G.E. Moore at the spinet."

"How necessary it is to think of the poet as somebody who has prepared himself to be visited by a dæmon, as a sort of accident-prone worker to whom poems happen — for otherwise we expect him to go on writing good poems, better poems, and this is the one thing you cannot expect even of good poets, much less of anybody else. Good painters in their sixties may produce good pictures as regularly as an orchard produces apples; but Planck is a great scientist because he made one discovery as a young man — and I can remember reading in a mathematician’s memoirs a sentence composedly recognizing the fact that, since the writer was now past forty, he was unlikely ever again to do any important creative work in mathematics. A man who is a good poet at forty may turn out to be a good poet at sixty; but he is more likely to have stopped writing poems, to be doing exercises in his own manner, or to have reverted to whatever commonplaces were popular when he was young. A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great."

"Many poets...write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia."

"A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry is a standard Oscar Williams production... ...the book has the merit of containing a considerably larger selection of Oscar Williams’s poems than I have seen in any other anthology. There are nine of his poems — and five of Hardy’s. It takes a lot of courage to like your own poetry almost twice as well as Hardy’s."

"I think Miss Moore was right to cut “The Steeple-Jack” — the poem seems plainer and clearer in its shortened state — but she has cut too much... The reader may feel like saying, “Let her do as she pleases with the poem; it’s hers, isn’t it?” No; it’s much too good a poem for that, it long ago became everybody’s, and we can protest just as we could if Donatello cut off David’s left leg."

"Butter not only wouldn’t melt in this mouth, it wouldn’t go in; one runs away, an urchin in the gutter and glad to be, murmuring: “The Queen of Spain has no legs.” … One’s eyes widen; one sits the poet down in the porch swing, starts to go off to get her a glass of lemonade, and sees her metamorphosed before one’s eyes into a new Critique of Practical Reason.., feminine gender..."

"Who would be such a fool as to make advances to his reader, advances which might end in rejection or, worse still, in acceptance?"

"What Miss Moore’s best poetry does, I can say best in her words: it “comes into and steadies the soul,” so that the reader feels himself “a life prisoner, but reconciled.”"

"It is odd how pleasant and sympathetic her poems are, in these days when many a poet had rather walk down children like Mr. Hyde than weep over them like Swinburne, and when many a poem is gruesome occupational therapy for a poet who stays legally innocuous by means of it."

"The usual bad poem in somebody’s Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and little emptier than, brushing one’s teeth."

"If you never look just wrong to your contemporaries you will never look just right to posterity — every writer has to try to be, to some extent, sometimes, a law unto himself."

"[Robert Lowell] is a poet of both Will and Imagination, but his Will is always seizing his Imagination by the shoulders and saying to it in a grating voice: “Don’t sit there fooling around; get to work!” — and his poor Imagination gets tense all over and begins to revolve determinedly and familiarly, like a squirrel in a squirrel-cage. Goethe talked about the half-somnambulistic state of the poet; but Mr. Lowell too often is either having a nightmare or else is wide awake gritting his teeth and working away at All The Things He Does Best. Cocteau said to poets: Learn what you can do and then don’t do it; and this is so — we do it enough without trying. As a poet Mr. Lowell sometimes doesn’t have enough trust in God and tries to do everything himself: he proposes and disposes — and this helps to give a certain monotony to his work."

"Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Benton had been endowed with one to begin with, and had smiled and sweated and and spoken for the other. A visitor looked under black beams, through leaded casements (past apple boughs, past box, past chairs like bath-tubs on broomsticks) to a lawn ornamented with one of the statues of David Smith; in the months since the figure had been put in its place a shrike had deserted for it a neighboring thorn tree, and an archer had skinned her leg against its farthest spike. On the table in the President’s waiting-room there were copies of Town and Country, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and a small magazine — a little magazine — that had no name. One walked by a mahogany hat-rack, glanced at the coat of arms on an umbrella-stand, and brushed with one’s sleeve something that gave a ghostly tinkle — four or five black and orange ellipsoids, set on grey wires, trembled in the faint breeze of the air-conditioning unit: a mobile. A cloud passed over the sun, and there came trailing from the gymnasium, in maillots and blue jeans, a melancholy procession, four dancers helping to the infirmary a friend who had dislocated her shoulder in the final variation of The Eye of Anguish."

"People had always seemed to Gertrude rather like the beasts in Animal Farm: all equally detestable, but some more equally detestable than others..."