Randall Jarrell on Books

"Age could not wither nor custom stale her infinite monotony: in fact, neither Age nor Custom could do anything with the American novelist Gertrude Johnson."

"New Directions is a reviewer’s nightmare; it’s enough punishment to read it all, without writing about it too."

"If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help."

"...modern poetry is necessarily obscure; if the reader can’t get it, let him eat Browning..."

"Oscar Williams’s new book is pleasanter and a little quieter than his old, which gave the impression of having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter."

"...a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it..."

"It is rare for a novel to have an ending as good as its middle and beginning..."

"One thinks with awe and longing of this real and extraordinary popularity of hers : if there were some poet — Frost, Stevens, Eliot — whom people still read in canoes!"

"If wishes were stories, beggars would read..."

"How poet and public stared at each other with righteous indignation, till the poet said, “Since you won’t read me, I’ll make sure you can’t” — is one of the most complicated and interesting of stories."

"The writer does not get from his work as he writes and reads it the same aesthetic shock that the reader does; and since the writer is so accustomed to reading other stories, and having them produce a decided effect upon him, he is disquieted at not being equally affected by his own."

"Lending a favorite book has its risks; the borrower may not like it. I still don’t know a better novel than Crime and Punishment — still, every fourth or fifth borrower returns it unfinished: it depresses him; besides that, he didn’t believe it. More borrowers than this return the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past unfinished: they were bored. There is no book you can lend people that all of them will like."

"One of our universities recently made a survey of the reading habits of the American public; it decided that forty-eight percent of all Americans read, during a year, no book at all. I picture to myself that reader — that non-reader, rather; one man out of every two — and I reflect, with shame: "Our poems are too hard for him." But so, too, are Treasure Island, Peter Rabbit, pornographic novels — any book whatsoever."