Leadership Quote by Randall Jarrell

Jarrell turns the poet into a daredevil of attention: someone who keeps stepping into weather other people sensibly avoid, gambling on the rare instant when the sky answers back. The thunderstorm isn’t just “inspiration” dressed up as scenery. It’s the long haul of exposure: to boredom, failure, other people’s indifference, your own changing taste, the constant threat of writing something dead on arrival. “Standing out” makes the poet look faintly ridiculous, even self-incriminating, as if the job description includes courting disaster and then acting surprised when it arrives.

The lightning is the real sting. Jarrell doesn’t promise steady genius or a reliable pipeline to greatness; he quantifies it down to “five or six times.” That number is both consolation and indictment. Consolation, because it suggests the artist’s career isn’t measured by daily output but by a handful of genuine strikes: the poems where language snaps into inevitability. Indictment, because it implies most of the time is spent waiting in the rain, mistaking noise for revelation, enduring the unglamorous discipline that rarely pays off.

Context matters: Jarrell wrote as a poet-critic with a war-era sense of contingency and a reviewer’s impatience for inflated reputations. The metaphor quietly punctures Romantic mythmaking while keeping a sliver of awe intact. The poet isn’t a prophet; he’s a human lightning rod, stubborn enough to keep showing up for the storm, and lucky enough to be hit before the weather moves on.