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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

“…a [literary] style can be a whole way of existing, so that you exist, for the moment, in perfect sympathy with it: you don’t read it so much as listen to it as it sweeps you along—fast enough, often, to make you feel a blurred pleasure in your own speed. Often a phrase or sentence has the uncaring unconscious authority—how else could you say it?—that only a real style has.”

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Randall Jarrell

“An Unread Book”, p. 36
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“Individualism, isolation, alienation. The poet is not only different from society, he is as different as possible from other poets; all this differentness is exploited to the limit—is used as subject matter, even. Each poet develops an elaborate, “personalized”, bureaucratized machinery of effect; refine your singularities is everybody’s maxim.”

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Randall Jarrell

of modernism; “The End of the Line”, p. 81
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“Such cultural homosexuality is an alienation more or less forced upon certain groups of Auden’s society by the form of their education and the nature of their social and financial conditions. Where the members of a class and a sex are taught, in a prolonged narcissistic isolation, to hero-worship themselves—class and sex; where—to a different class—unemployment is normal, where one’s pay is inadequate or impossible for more than one; where children are expensive liabilities instead of assets; where women are business competitors; where most social relationships have become as abstract, individualistic, and mobile as the relations of the labor market, homosexuality is a welcome asset to the state, one of the cheapest and least dangerous forms of revolution.”

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Randall Jarrell

“Changes of Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden’s Poetry”, pp. 127–128
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“But there is a Pope in the breast of each of us whom is hard to silence. Long ago a lady said to me, when I asked her the composers she liked: “Dvorak.” I said before I could stop myself: “Dvorak!” How many times, and with what shame, I’ve remembered it. And now I like Dvorak…”

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Randall Jarrell

“Speaking of Books”, p. 220
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“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 the worst of times.”

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Randall Jarrell

"The Taste of the Age," The Saturday Evening Post (1958-07-26) [p. 290]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“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.”

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Randall Jarrell

"The Obscurity of the Poet", p. 15
Poetry and the Age (1953)

“Many young poets, nowadays, are insured against everything. For them poetry is a game like court tennis or squash racquets — one they learned at college — and they play it with propriety, as part of their social and academic existence; their poems are occasional verse for which life itself is only one more occasion.”

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Randall Jarrell

"Recent Poetry," The Yale Review (Autumn 1955) [p. 231]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“If wishes were stories, beggars would read…”

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Randall Jarrell

“Stories”, p. 141
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

“One thinks with awe and longing of this real and extraordinary popularity of hers [Edna St. Vincent Millay’s]: if there were some poet—Frost, Stevens, Eliot—whom people still read in canoes!”

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Randall Jarrell

“Fifty Years of American Poetry”, p. 329
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces.”

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Randall Jarrell

“An Unread Book”, p. 20
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“Once, along with The Transfigured Night, he played a class Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead. Most of the class had not seen the painting, so he went to the library and returned with a reproduction of it. Then he pointed, with a sober smile, to a painting which hung on the wall of the classroom (A Representation of Several Areas, Some of Them Grey, one might have called it; yet this would have been unjust to it—it was non-representational) and played for the class, on the piano, a composition which he said was an interpretation of the painting: he played very slowly and very calmly, with his elbows, so that it sounded like blocks falling downstairs, but in slow motion. But half his class took this as seriously as they took everything else, and asked him for weeks afterward about prepared pianos, tone-clusters, and the compositions of John Cage and Henry Cowell; one girl finally brought him a lovely silk-screen reproduction of a painting by Jackson Pollock, and was just opening her mouth to—
He interrupted, bewilderingly, by asking the Lord what land He had brought him into. The girl stared at him open-mouthed, and he at once said apologetically that he was only quoting Mahler, who had also diedt from America; then he gave her such a winning smile that she said to her roommate that night, forgivingly: “He really is a nice old guy. You never would know he’s famous.””

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Randall Jarrell libro Pictures from an Institution

“Is he really famous?” her roommate asked. “I never heard of him before I got here. ...”
Origine: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 4, pp. 138–139

“Christina Stead has a Chinese say, “Our old age is perhaps life’s decision about us”—or, worse, the decision we have made about ourselves without ever realizing we were making it.”

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Randall Jarrell

“An Unread Book”, p. 42
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“The poet needs to be deluded about his poems—for who can be sure that it is delusion? In his strongest hours the public hardly exists for the writer; he does what he ought to do, has to do, and if afterwards some Public wishes to come and crown him with laurel crowns, well, let it! if critics wish to tell people all that he isn’t, well, let them—he knows what he is. But at night when he can’t get to sleep it seems to him that it is what he is, his own particular personal quality, that he is being disliked for. It is this that the future will like him for, if it likes him for anything; but will it like him for anything? The poet’s hope is in posterity, but it is a pale hope; and now that posterity itself has become a pale hope…”

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Randall Jarrell

“Poets, Critics, and Readers”, p. 109
No Other Book: Selected Essays (1999)

“When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own; but to accept it because its stews taste exactly like your old mother's hash, or to reject it because the owl-headed goddess of wisdom in its temple is fatter than the Statue of Liberty, is an equal mark of that want of imagination, that inaccessibility to experience, of which each of us who dies a natural death will die.”

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Randall Jarrell

"The Obscurity of the Poet," Harvard University lecture (15 August 1950) delivered at the Harvard University Summer School Conference on the Defense of Poetry (August 14-17, 1950); reprinted in Partisan Review, XVIII (January/February 1951) and published in Poetry and the Age (1953)
General sources
Variante: When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own; but to accept it because its stews taste exactly like your old mother's hash, or to reject it because the owl-headed goddess of wisdom in its temple is fatter than the Statue of Liberty, is an equal mark of that want of imagination, that inaccessibility to experience, of which each of us who dies a natural death will die.

“Few poets have made a more interesting rhetoric out of just fooling around: turning things upside down, looking at them from under the sofa, considering them (and their observer) curiously enough to make the reader protest, “That were to consider it too curiously.””

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Randall Jarrell

“The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p. 64
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“A great revolution is hardest of all on the great revolutionists.”

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Randall Jarrell

“The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p. 67
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“…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.”

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Randall Jarrell

"The Obscurity of the Poet". p. 9
No Other Book: Selected Essays (1999)
Variante: 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.

“Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise; a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.”

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Randall Jarrell

“Contemporary Poetry Criticism”, p. 61
No Other Book: Selected Essays (1999)

“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.”

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Randall Jarrell libro Pictures from an Institution

Origine: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 1: “The President, Mrs., and Derek Robbins”, p. 3; opening paragraph of novel

“It is better to have the child in the chimney corner moved by what happens in the poem, in spite of his ignorance of its real meaning, than to have the poem a puzzle to which that meaning is the only key. Still, complicated subjects make complicated poems, and some of the best poems can move only the best readers; this is one more question of curves of normal distribution. I have tried to make my poems plain, and most of them are plain enough; but I wish that they were more difficult because I had known more.”

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Randall Jarrell

"Answers to Questions," from Mid-Century American Poets, edited by John Ciardi, 1950 [p. 170]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“If you look at the world with parted lips and a pure heart, and will the good, won't that make a true and beautiful poem? One's heart tells one that it will; and one's heart is wrong. There is no direct road to Parnassus.”

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Randall Jarrell

"Recent Poetry," The Yale Review (Autumn 1955) [p. 237]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“Anyone who has read Yeats’s wonderful Autobiography will remember his Sligo—shabby, shadowed, half country and half sea, full of confused romance, superstition, poverty, eccentricity, unrecognized anachronism, passion and ignorance and the little boy’s misery. Yeats was treated well but was bitterly unhappy; he prayed that he would die, and used often to say to himself: “When you are grown up, never talk as grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood.””

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Randall Jarrell

“The Development of Yeats’s Sense of Reality”, p. 89
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

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

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Randall Jarrell

“Some Lines from Whitman”, p. 119
Poetry and the Age (1953)

“I shook myself; I was dreaming. As I went to bed the words of the eighth-grade class’s teacher, when the class got to Evangeline, kept echoing in my ears: “We’re coming to a long poem now, boys and girls. Now don’t be babies and start counting the pages.” I lay there like a baby, counting the pages over and over, counting the pages.”

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Randall Jarrell

“The Taste of the Age”, p. 42; conclusion
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

“A good religious poem, today, is ambergris, and it is hard to enjoy it for thinking of all those suffering whales; but martyrs are born, not made.”

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Randall Jarrell

"Poetry in War and Peace," Partisan Review (Winter 1945) [p. 133]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“If you’re going to hang me, you mustn’t expect to be able to intimidate me into sparing your feelings during the execution.”

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Randall Jarrell

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

“What we are most anxious about is our anxiety itself: the greatest of all sins, Auden learns from Kafka, is impatience—and he decides that the hero “is, in fact, one who is not anxious.” But it was inevitable that Auden should arrive at this point. His anxiety is fundamental; and the one thing that anxiety cannot do is to accept itself, to do nothing about itself—consequently it admires more than anything else in the world doing nothing, sitting still, waiting.”

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Randall Jarrell

“Freud to Paul: The Stages of Auden’s Ideology”, p. 180
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“Early in his life Mr. [Ezra] Pound met with strong, continued, and unintelligent opposition. If people keep opposing you when you are right, you think them fools; and after a time, right or wrong, you think them fools simply because they oppose you. Similarly, you write true things or good things, and end by thinking things true or good simply because you write them”

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Randall Jarrell

“Poets: Old, New, and Aging”, p. 44
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“Animals, these beings trapped
As I am trapped but not, themselves, the trap,
Aging, but without knowledge of their age,
Kept safe here, knowing not of death, for death
— Oh, bars of my own body, open, open!The world goes by my cage and never sees me.”

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Randall Jarrell

"The Woman at the Washington Zoo," lines 14-19
The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960)

“A culture is no better than its woods,” Auden writes. Fortunately for him, a book of poetry can be better than its poems. Two-thirds of The Shield of Achilles is non-Euclidean needlepoint, a man sitting on a chaise longue juggling four cups, four saucers, four sugar lumps, and the round-square: this is what great and good poets do when they don’t even bother to write great and good poems, now that they’ve learned that—it’s Auden’s leitmotif, these days—art is essentially frivolous. But a little of the time Auden is essentially serious, and the rest of the time he’s so witty, intelligent, and individual, so angelically skillful, that one reads with despairing enthusiasm, and enjoys Auden’s most complacently self-indulgent idiosyncrasy almost as one enjoys Sherlock Holmes’s writing Victoria Rex on the wall in bullet holes.”

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Randall Jarrell

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

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