Randall Jarrell

"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 a…"

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

"Gertrude knew better than this, of course, but we all know better than we know better, or act as if we did."

"...Stevens does not think of inspiration as a condition of composition. He too is waiting for the spark from heaven to fall — poets have no choice about this — but he waits writing; and this — other t…"

"President Robbins was so well adjusted to his environment that sometimes you could not tell which was the environment and which was President Robbins."

"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 ti…"

"...if sometimes we are bogged down in lines full of “corybulous”, “hypogeum”, “plangent”, “irrefragably”, “glozening”, “tellurian”, “conclamant”, sometimes we are caught up in the soaring rapture of s…"

"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 curiously enough to make the reader protes…"