Frasi di Randall Jarrell

Randall Jarrell è stato un poeta, saggista e scrittore statunitense.

✵ 6. Maggio 1914 – 14. Ottobre 1965
Randall Jarrell: 218   frasi 1   Mi piace

Randall Jarrell frasi celebri

Randall Jarrell: Frasi in inglese

“…our quarrels with the world are like our quarrels with God: no matter how right we are, we are wrong.”

“The Taste of the Age”, p. 40
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

“You had our wit, our heart was sealed to you:
Man is the judgment of the world.”

"Variations," lines 40-44
Blood for a Stranger (1942)
Contesto: And the world said, Child, you will not be missed.
You are cheaper than a wrench, your back is a road;
Your death is a table in a book.
You had our wit, our heart was sealed to you:
Man is the judgment of the world.

“After a while one is embarrassed not so much for them as for poetry, which is for these poor poets one more of the openings against which everyone in the end beats his brains out; and one finds it unbearable that poetry should be so hard to write — a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey in which there is for most of the players no tail, no donkey, not even a booby prize.”

"Verse Chronicle," The Nation (23 February 1946); reprinted as "Bad Poets" in Poetry and the Age (1953)
General sources
Contesto: Sometimes it is hard to criticize, one wants only to chronicle. The good and mediocre books come in from week to week, and I put them aside and read them and think of what to say; but the "worthless" books come in day after day, like the cries and truck sounds from the street, and there is nothing that anyone could think of that is good enough for them. In the bad type of thin pamphlets, in hand-set lines on imported paper, people's hard lives and hopeless ambitions have expressed themselves more directly and heartbreakingly than they have ever expressed in any work of art: it is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with "This is a poem" scrawled on them in lipstick. After a while one is embarrassed not so much for them as for poetry, which is for these poor poets one more of the openings against which everyone in the end beats his brains out; and one finds it unbearable that poetry should be so hard to write — a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey in which there is for most of the players no tail, no donkey, not even a booby prize.

“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.”

Losses (1948)
Contesto: 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.

"Losses," lines 21-28

“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.”

“The Obscurity of the Poet”, p. 3
Poetry and the Age (1953)
Contesto: 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.

“The face is its own fate — a man does what he must —
And the body underneath it says: I am.”

"The Knight, Death and the Devil," lines 34-39
The Seven-League Crutches (1951)
Contesto: 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.

“The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing”

“The Obscurity of the Poet”, p. 17
Poetry and the Age (1953)
Contesto: 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.

“Men wash their hands in blood, as best they can:
I find no fault in this just man.”

"Eighth Air Force," lines 16-20
Losses (1948)
Contesto: 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.

“These writers, plainly, lived in different worlds.”

“The Obscurity of the Poet”, p. 17
Poetry and the Age (1953)
Contesto: 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.

“I see at last that all the knowledgeI wrung from the darkness — that the darkness flung me —
Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,
The darkness from the darkness.”

"90 North," lines 28-32
Blood for a Stranger (1942)
Contesto: I see at last that all the knowledgeI wrung from the darkness — that the darkness flung me —
Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,
The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness
And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

“Poetry is a bad medium for philosophy.”

“Reflections on Wallace Stevens”, p. 127, originally in Partisan Review, Vol. 18, (May/June 1951)
Poetry and the Age (1953)
Contesto: 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.

“This is the devil. Flesh to flesh, he bleats
The herd back to the pit of being.”

"The Knight, Death and the Devil," lines 17-20
The Seven-League Crutches (1951)
Contesto: 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.

“The soul has no assignments, neither cooks
Nor referees: it wastes its time.”

"A Girl in a Library," lines 32-29
The Seven-League Crutches (1951)
Contesto: 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.

“Sometimes it is hard to criticize, one wants only to chronicle.”

"Verse Chronicle," The Nation (23 February 1946); reprinted as "Bad Poets" in Poetry and the Age (1953)
General sources
Contesto: Sometimes it is hard to criticize, one wants only to chronicle. The good and mediocre books come in from week to week, and I put them aside and read them and think of what to say; but the "worthless" books come in day after day, like the cries and truck sounds from the street, and there is nothing that anyone could think of that is good enough for them. In the bad type of thin pamphlets, in hand-set lines on imported paper, people's hard lives and hopeless ambitions have expressed themselves more directly and heartbreakingly than they have ever expressed in any work of art: it is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with "This is a poem" scrawled on them in lipstick. After a while one is embarrassed not so much for them as for poetry, which is for these poor poets one more of the openings against which everyone in the end beats his brains out; and one finds it unbearable that poetry should be so hard to write — a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey in which there is for most of the players no tail, no donkey, not even a booby prize.

“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.”

“Reflections on Wallace Stevens”, p. 134; conclusion
Poetry and the Age (1953)
Contesto: 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.

“Consider some of the qualities of typical modernistic poetry: very interesting language, a great emphasis on connotation, "texture"; extreme intensity, forced emotion — violence; a good deal of obscurity; emphasis on sensation, perceptual nuances; emphasis on details, on the part rather than on the whole; experimental or novel qualities of some sort; a tendency toward external formlessness and internal disorganization — these are justified, generally, as the disorganization required to express a disorganized age, or, alternatively, as newly discovered and more complex types of organization; an extremely personal style — refine your singularities; lack of restraint — all tendencies are forced to their limits; there is a good deal of emphasis on the unconscious, dream structure, the thoroughly subjective; the poet's attitudes are usually anti-scientific, anti-common-sense, anti-public — he is, essentially, removed; poetry is primarily lyric, intensive — the few long poems are aggregations of lyric details; poems usually have, not a logical, but the more or less associational style of dramatic monologue; and so on and so on. This complex of qualities is essentially romantic; and the poetry that exhibits it represents the culminating point of romanticism.”

Randall Jarrell libro Five Young American Poets

"A Note on Poetry," preface to The Rage for the Lost Penny: Five Young American Poets (New Directions, 1940) [p. 49]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“[IRENE ROSENBAUM:] …“you Americans do not rear children, you incite them; you give them food and shelter and applause”…”

Randall Jarrell libro Pictures from an Institution

Origine: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 4, p. 180

“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.”

“The Obscurity of the Poet”, p. 24
Poetry and the Age (1953)
Contesto: 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.

“…modern poetry is necessarily obscure; if the reader can’t get it, let him eat Browning…”

“Changes of Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden’s Poetry”, p. 149
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.”

"Poetry in War and Peace," Partisan Review (Winter 1945) [p. 129]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.”

"An Unread Book," introduction to The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead (Holt, Rinehart, 1965 edition)
General sources

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