Frasi di Randall Jarrell (218 frasi, pagina 5)

"The Woman at the Washington Zoo," [an essay about the writing of the poem by that name] from Understanding Poetry, third edition, ed. Cleanth Brooks (1960) [p. 319]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“…there is in this world no line so bad that someone won’t someday copy it.”

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Randall Jarrell

“The Profession of Poetry”, p. 165
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“Most works of art are, necessarily, bad…; one suffers through the many for the few.”

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Randall Jarrell

“The Little Cars”, p. 200
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“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.”

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Randall Jarrell libro Pictures from an Institution

Origine: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 1, p. 22

“He loved hitherto-unthought-of, thereafter-unthinkable combinations of instruments. When some extraordinary array of players filed half-proudly, half-sheepishly on to the stage, looking like the Bremen Town Musicians—if those were, as I think they were, a rooster, a cat, a dog, and a donkey—you could guess beforehand that it was to be one of Gottfried’s compositions. His Joyous Celebration of the Memory of the Master Johann Sebastian Bach had a tone-row composed of the notes B, A, C, and H (in the German notation), of these inverted, and of these transposed; and there were four movements, the first played on instruments beginning with the letter b, the second on instruments beginning with the letter a, and so on. After the magnificent group that ushered in the piece (bugle, bass-viol, bassoon, basset-horn, bombardon, bass-drum, baritone, and a violinist with only his bow) it was sad to see an Alp horn and an accordion come in to play the second movement. Gottfriend himself said about the first group: “Vot a bunch!””

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Randall Jarrell libro Pictures from an Institution

When I asked him how he had thought of it he said placidly: “De devil soldt me his soul.”
Origine: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 4: “Constance and the Rosenbaums”, p. 136

“That most human and American of presidents—of Americans—Abraham Lincoln, said as a young man: “The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.” It’s a hard heart, and a dull one, that doesn’t go out to that sentence. The man who will make us see what we haven’t seen, feel what we haven’t felt, understand what we haven’t understood—he is our best friend. And if he knows more than we do, that is an invitation to us, not an indictment of us. And it is not an indictment of him, either; it takes all sorts of people to make a world—to make, even, a United States of America.”

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Randall Jarrell

“The Intellectual in America”, p. 15; conclusion
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

“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 would say if they could — is more real, in some sense, than what people do say. If you have given your imagination free rein, let things go as far as they want to go, the world they made for themselves while you watched can have, for you and later watchers, a spontaneous finality.”

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Randall Jarrell

"On Preparing to Read Kipling," introduction to The Best Short Stories of Rudyard Kipling (1961) [p. 335]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“Miss Rasmussen made a welded sculpture. Her statues were—as she would say, smiling—untouched by human hands; and they looked it. You could tell one from another, if you wanted to, but it was hard to want to. You felt, yawning: It’s ugly, but is it Art?
Miss Rasmussen also designed furniture, but people persisted in sitting down in her sculpture, and in asking “What is that named?” of her chairs. This showed how advanced her work was, and pleased her; yet when she laughed to show her pleasure, her laugh sounded thin and strained.”

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Randall Jarrell libro Pictures from an Institution

Origine: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 6: “Art Night”, p. 228

“The characteristic poetic strategy of our time—refine your singularities—is something Auden has not learned; so his best poems are very peculiarly good, nearly the most interesting poems of our time. When he writes badly, we can afford to be angry at him, and he can afford to laugh at us.”

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Randall Jarrell

“Poetry in a Dry Season”, p. 37
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“The motto of his [Robinson Jeffers’s] work is “More! More!”—but as Tolstoy says, “A wee bit omitted, overemphasized, or exaggerated in poetry, and there is no contagion”; and Frost, bearing him out, says magnificently: “A very little of anything goes a long way in a work of art.””

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Randall Jarrell

“Fifty Years of American Poetry”, pp. 322–323
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)