Randall Jarrell Quotes

The Romantics were whipping boys of the New Criticism, but they appealed to me anyway. I was recalcitrant. It was clear to me that they had thought innovatively.

There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.

What I realized is that my interest in literature has more deeply structured my practice than I thought.

I'm a fan of Hugh Kenner, Richard Ellman, Lionel Trilling and Frank Kermode. All these people have taught me how to read - but perhaps, above all literary critics, I'm indebted to Wayne Booth (several people have suggested to me that I'm trying to reinvent "ethical criticism").

The latest literary discussions reflect a struggle between two artistic methods - romanticism and realism, with the latter clearly ascendant for the time being.

Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.

I don't think the nature of my poetry is satirical or even ironic, I think it's essentially lyrical but again I don't know if it's my position to say what my poetry is like.

Everything that's prose isn't verse and everything that isn't verse is prose. Now you see what it is to be a scholar!

Nothing, except the weather report or a general maxim of conduct, is so unsafe to rely upon as a theory of fiction.

That strange premature genius Chatterton has couched in one line the quintessence of what Voltaire has said in many pages: "Reason, a thorn in Revelation's side.

Kenneth Burke calls form the satisfaction of an expectation; The Man Who Loved Children is full of such satisfactions, but it has a good deal of the deliberate disappointment of an expectation that is also form.

After all, poets shouldn't be their own interpreters and shouldn't carefully dissect their poems into everyday prose; that would mean the end of being poets. Poets send their creations into the world, it is up to the reader, the aesthetician, and the critic to determine what they wanted to say with their creations.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticising.

In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.

Literary critics, like a herd of cows or a school of fish, always face in the same direction, obeying that love for unity that every critic requires.

All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.

I've always been terribly uninterested in criticism. And one of the reasons, I just thought recently, is that you know there are various schools of criticism that will compete, and one will supercede the other.

Fourteen years in the professor dodge has taught me that one can argue ingeniously on behalf of any theory, applied to any piece of literature. This is rarely harmful, because normally no-one reads such essays.

I have no literary approach - except to literature.

The worse the passage the more welcome the port.

Deconstruction glorifies the critic, humiliates the author, and makes the reader wonder why he bothered.

The curious hocus-pocus of criticism I can't take seriously. It consists in squirreling up some odd phrases and then waiting for a book to come running by.

Frederick Buechner can find grace and redemption even in the shoddiest, phoniest aspects of a cultural wasteland. One reads Lion Country...with hope and delight.

The English literary movement at the end of the 18th century was obviously due in great part, if not mainly, to the renewed practice of walking.

It's hard to think that say Shakespeare could have written "The Tempest" when he was young. It seems to be reflective work or retrospective work.