Randall Jarell Quotes

“Dieser letzte Satz war einer, von dem man sich vorstellen kann, daß Randall Jarrell ihn ausschnitt und als Schutz gegen die Unzahl der ungebildeten Alleswisser dieser Welt in seine Brieftasche steckte.”
― Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: Leben, Werk und Zeit. Erweiterte Ausgabe mit neuem Vorwort

“in about 1950, Arendt gave a lecture with the enigmatic title "The Eggs Speak Up," explained by the epigraph she chose from "A War" by Randall Jarrell:

There set out, slowly, for a Different World,
At four, on winter mornings, different legs...
You can't break eggs without making an omelette
-That's what they tell the eggs.

Jarrell had read in Origins that totalitarianism forged a "chain of fatality" - a chain of logical arguments - which threatens to "suppress men from the history of the human race." Jarrell's poem reads like a response to this sentence since it is about the necessity of interrupting this chain. With this epigraph, Arendt introduces her listeners to what she has to say.”
― Marie Luise Knott, Unlearning with Hannah Arendt