Carolina QuotesNew Directions is a reviewer’s nightmare; it’s enough punishment to read it all, without writing about it too.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
In All Directions”, p. 87
- work
- Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
- year
- 1935
- locator
- p. 87
Cite this record
“New Directions is a reviewer’s nightmare; it’s enough punish…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-047BCC92EB. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/047bcc92eb
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What to leave out is the first thing the artist has to decide; a painter who “held the mirror up to nature” would spend his life on the leaves of one landscape. The work of art’s fluctuating and idiosyncratic threshold of attention — the great things disregarded, the small things seized and dwelt on — is as much of a signature as anything in it.
In Heaven all reviews will be favorable; here on earth, the publisher realizes, plausibility demands an occasional bad one, some convincing lump in all that leaven, and he accepts it somewhat as a theologian accepts Evil.