Randall Jarrell Quotes

Nay, what is worse, perhaps turn poet, which, they say, is an infectious and incurable distemper.

Poetry is just so emo." he said. "Oh, the pain. The pain. It always rains. In my soul.

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.

You have to write some poetry, first of all, to decide if you can become a lyricist. I was born in a family of poets.

I thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.

When I devoted myself to poetry - and poetry is a very serious medium - I don't think the people that knew me as an individual with that tongue-in-cheek kind of humor...well, it didn't always lend itself to my poetry. When you're writing poetry, it's like working with gold, you can't waste anything. You have to be very economical with each word you're going to select. But when you're writing fiction, you can just go on and on; you can be more playful. My editor's main task is to cut back, not ask for more.

Writing poetry helps me to write my fiction; each thing helps the other.

Poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of everything.

When I write, I tend toward melancholy, and the few times that I've tried pure joy in music, it doesn't really work that well. The joy can be through catharsis. I think that's what I do well, and observation.

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.

Anyone can express himself or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate.

A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.

One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life. I still feel surprised that such various substances can find shelter and nourishment in a poem. A poem in fact may be a sort of nourishing liquid, such as one uses to keep an amoeba alive. If prepared right, a poem can keep an image or a thought or insights on history or the psyche alive for years, as well as our desires and airy impulses.

A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.

The kind of poetry I write, lyric poetry, I think is really concerned with intimacy, with mystery. That needn't be religious mystery, there are mysteries to do with everyday life.

Poetry fettered fetters the human race.

I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.

Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.

Poetry -- even bad poetry -- may be our final hope.

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

I haven't written poetry in a long time but I read it and I miss it. It is so hard to write. So hard to finish, so hard to find the exact word to make it shine. In honor of my youth I will write a poem to finish this essay. It is spring in the Ozark Mountains. The yellow flowers are blooming and the birds wake me at dawn and last night five planets lined up by the moon in the western sky. If that doesn't inspire me to poetry what will?

When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.