Randall Jarrell Quotes

Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.

Critics have their purposes, and they're supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what they did.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true.

It's very easy for me to watch a performance and just speak on it as I see it.

Sir, I admit your general rule, That every poet is a fool, But you yourself may serve to show it, That every fool is not a poet.

If you believe you're a poet, then you're saved.

In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.

Longfellow is to poetry what the barrel-organ is to music.

Anybody is qualified, according to everybody, for giving opinions upon poetry. It is not so in chemistry and mathematics. Nor is it so, I believe, in whist and the polka. But then these are more serious things.

When poets go off the boil, they sound like bumble bees; when critics do, they sound like sewing machines.

All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.

There are good and bad critics like good or bad artists. A good critic says why they didn't like it. A bad critic gives it away that they don't like you as a person. I quite like that as well, because it means that I've won.

A fool, for example, thinks Shakespeare a great poet . . . yet the fool has never read Shakespeare.

Nobody has to tell nobody nothing,” I say, taking another step forward. “You never were a poet, were you, Todd?” he says.

I don't feel any real animosity towards critics when they write negative things. I think some are more perceptive than others. Some are very knowledgeable about painting. But it isn't something I have any influence over, so there isn't any point in worrying about it.

A poem is made up of thoughts, each of which filled the whole sky of the poet in its turn.

A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.

Poets are always the advance guard of literature; the advance guard of life. It is for this reason that their recognition comes so slowly.

Mediocrity is more dangerous in a critic than in a writer.

If I stop being on good behaviour for a moment, my dark little secret is that I don't actually believe many people in the art world have much feeling for art and simply cannot tell a good artist from a weak one, until the artist has enjoyed the validation of others - a received pronunciation.