Quotes from Randall Jarell

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

How young I seem; I am exceptional; I think of all I have. But really no one is exceptional, No one has anything, I'm anybody, I stand beside my grave Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary.

It is always difficult for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend, but because their poems are bad.