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Frasi di Randall Jarrell
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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

“Per un bambino una delle considerazioni più ovvie sugli adulti è che si sono dimenticati di cosa vuol dire essere bambini.”

Randall Jarrell

“La gente che vive in un'età dell'oro sostanzialmente va in giro lamentandosi di come tutto intorno sembri giallo.”

Randall Jarrell

“Negli Stati Uniti, lì sì che le persone si sentono libere… Eccetto gli Americani – ma ogni perla ha la sua ostrica.”

Randall Jarrell

Randall Jarrell: Frasi in inglese

“Be, as you have been, my happiness;
Let me sleep beside you, each night, like a spoon.”

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Randall Jarrell

"Woman," lines 170-171
The Lost World (1965)

“We are all—so to speak—intellectuals about something.”

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Randall Jarrell

“The Intellectual in America”, p. 11
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

“An author frequently chooses solemn or overwhelming subjects to write about; he is so impressed at writing about Life and Death that he does not notice that he is saying nothing of the slightest importance about either.”

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Randall Jarrell

"Ten Books," The Southern Review (Autumn 1935) [p. 9]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“Her point of view about student work was that of a social worker teaching finger-painting to children or the insane.
I was impressed with how common such an attitude was at Benton: the faculty—insofar as they were real Benton faculty, and not just nomadic barbarians—reasoned with the students, “appreciated their point of view”, used Socratic methods on them, made allowances for them, kept looking into the oven to see if they were done; but there was one allowance they never under any circumstances made—that the students might be right about something, and they wrong. Education, to them, was a psychiatric process: the sign under which they conquered had embroidered at the bottom, in small letters, Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?—and half of them gave it its Babu paraphrase of Can you wait upon a lunatic? One expected them to refer to former students as psychonanalysts do: “Oh, she’s an old analysand of mine.” They felt that the mind was a delicate plant which, carefully nurtured, judiciously left alone, must inevitably adopt for itself even the slightest of their own beliefs.
One Benton student, a girl noted for her beadth of reading and absence of coöperation, described things in a queer, exaggerated, plausible way. According to her, a professor at an ordinary school tells you “what’s so”, you admit that it is on examination, and what you really believe or come to believe has “that obscurity which is the privilege of young things”. But at Benton, where education was as democratic as in “that book about America by that French writer—de, de—you know the one I mean”; she meant de Tocqueville; there at Benton they wanted you really to believe everything they did, especially if they hadn’t told you what it was. You gave them the facts, the opinions of authorities, what you hoped was their own opinion; but they replied, “That’s not the point. What do you yourself really believe?” If it wasn’t what your professors believed, you and they could go on searching for your real belief forever—unless you stumbled at last upon that primal scene which is, by definition, at the root of anything….
When she said primal scene there was so much youth and knowledge in her face, so much of our first joy in created things, that I could not think of Benton for thinking of life. I suppose she was right: it is as hard to satisfy our elders’ demands of Independence as of Dependence. Harder: how much more complicated and indefinite a rationalization the first usually is!—and in both cases, it is their demands that must be satisfied, not our own. The faculty of Benton had for their students great expectations, and the students shook, sometimes gave, beneath the weight of them. If the intellectual demands were not so great as they might have been, the emotional demands made up for it. Many a girl, about to deliver to one of her teachers a final report on a year’s not-quite-completed project, had wanted to cry out like a child, “Whip me, whip me, Mother, just don’t be Reasonable!””

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Randall Jarrell libro Pictures from an Institution

Origine: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 3, pp. 81–83

“The ways we miss our lives are life.”

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Randall Jarrell

"A Girl in a Library," line 92
The Seven-League Crutches (1951)

“…whether they write poems or don’t write poems, poets are best.”

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Randall Jarrell

“Recent Poetry”, p. 227
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“… man is the animal that moralizes. Man is also the animal that complains about being one, and says that there is an animal, a beast inside him—that he is brother to dragons. (He is certainly a brother to wolves, and to pandas too, but he is father to dragons, not brother: they, like many gods and devils, are inventions of his.)”

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Randall Jarrell

“On the Underside of the Stone”, p. 177
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“A person is a process, one that leads to death…”

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Randall Jarrell

“An Unread Book”, p. 40
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“…in this world, often, there is nothing to praise but no one to blame…”

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Randall Jarrell

“On Preparing to Read Kipling”, p. 135
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

“Let’s say this together: “Great me no greats”, and leave this grading to posterity.”

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Randall Jarrell

“A Poet’s Own Way”, p. 202
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“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.””

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Randall Jarrell

“Her Shield”, p. 187
Poetry and the Age (1953)

“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.”

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Randall Jarrell libro Pictures from an Institution

Origine: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Ch. 2, p. 66

“Nowadays when a poet with one privately printed book can have his next three years taken care of by a Guggenheim fellowship, a Kenyon Review fellowship, and the Prix de Rome, it is hard to remember what chances the poet took in that small-town world, how precariously hand-to-mouth his existence was. And yet in one way the old days were better; [Vachel] Lindsay after a while, by luck and skill, got far more readers than any poet could get today.”

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Randall Jarrell

“Fifty Years of American Poetry”, p. 299
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“Imagism was a reductio ad absurdum of one or two tendencies of romanticism, such a beautifully and finally absurd one that it is hard to believe it existed as anything but a logical construction; and what imagist found it possible to go on writing imagist poetry? A number of poets have stopped writing entirely; others, like recurring decimals, repeat the novelties they commeced with, each time less valuably than before. And there are surrealist poetry, and political poetry, and all the othe refuges of the indigent.”

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Randall Jarrell

“A Note on Poetry”, p. 50
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“…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.”

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Randall Jarrell libro Pictures from an Institution

Origine: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 1, p. 25

“We live in an age which eschews sentimentality as if it were a good deal more than the devil. (Actually, of course, a writer may be just as sentimental in laying undue emphasis on sexual crimes as on dying mothers: sentimental, like scientific, is an adjective that relates to method, not to matter.)”

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Randall Jarrell

"Ten Books," The Southern Review (Autumn 1935) [p. 8]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“[Robert] 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.”

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Randall Jarrell

“To the Laodiceans”, p. 21
No Other Book: Selected Essays (1999)
Variante: [Robert] 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.

““Modern” poetry is, essentially, an extension of romanticism; it is what romantic poetry wishes or finds it necessary to become. It is the end product of romanticism, all past and no future; it is impossible to go further by any extrapolation of the process by which we have arrived, and certainly it is impossible to remain where we are—who could endure a century of transition?”

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Randall Jarrell

transition [sic] was the avant-garde English-language magazine published in Paris 1927–1938; “A Note on Poetry”, p. 48
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“In Stage II guilt is first of all social, liberal, moral guilt—a guilt so general as to seem almost formal. It is we who are responsible, either by commission or—more generally—by omission, for everything from killing off the Tasmanians to burning the books at Alexandria. (You didn’t do it? Then you should have stopped them from doing it. You never heard of it? Ignorant as well as evil, eh? You weren’t born? You’re guilty, I tell you—guilty.)”

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Randall Jarrell

“Freud to Paul: The Stages of Auden’s Ideology”, p. 169
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

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

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Randall Jarrell

“Her Shield”. p. 181
Poetry and the Age (1953)

“Critics disagree about almost every quality of a writer’s work; and when some agree about a quality, they disagree about whether it is to be praised or blamed, nurtured or rooted out. After enough criticism the writer is covered with lipstick and bruises, and the two are surprisingly evenly distributed.”

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Randall Jarrell

“Poets, Critics, and Readers”, p. 99
No Other Book: Selected Essays (1999)

“It is G. E. Moore at the spinet.”

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Randall Jarrell

“Reflections on Wallace Stevens”, p. 131
Poetry and the Age (1953)

“I have trouble knowing what to do at parties. Prisoners tame mice, or make rings out of spoons: I analyze people’s handwriting…or else ask you to tell me what you read when you were a child. (People speak unusually well of the books of their childhood, don’t they? Or is this one more life-giving illusion?) I love to see a hard eye grow soft over Little Women… And, I’ve found, there’s no children’s book so bad that I mind your having liked it: about the tastes of dead children there is no disputing.”

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Randall Jarrell

“Speaking of Books”, p. 219
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“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.”

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Randall Jarrell

“Poets”, pp. 212–213
Poetry and the Age (1953)

“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.”

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Randall Jarrell libro Pictures from an Institution

Origine: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 1, p. 12

“She said to Constance, parodying a line of poetry that attracted her, "In the United States, there one feels free." But she spoiled it by continuing, "Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster."”

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Randall Jarrell libro Pictures from an Institution

Origine: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Ch. 4, p. 181

“…most of the people in a war never fight for even a minute—though they bear for years and die forever. They do not fight, but only starve, only suffer, only die: the sum of all this passive misery is that great activity, War.”

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Randall Jarrell

“Poetry in War and Peace”, p. 129
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“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.”

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Randall Jarrell The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

"The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/707.html, complete poem
Little Friend, Little Friend (1945)

“…Stevens does not think of inspiration (or whatever you want to call it) as a condition of composition. He too is waiting for the spark from heaven to fall—poets have no choice about this—but he waits writing; and this—other things being equal, when it’s possible, if it’s possible—is the best way for a poet to wait.”

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Randall Jarrell

“The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p. 66
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

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

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Randall Jarrell

“John Ransom’s Poetry”, p. 98
Poetry and the Age (1953)

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