Carolina QuotesYou often feel about something in Shakespeare or Dostoevsky that nobody ever said such a thing, but it's just the sort of thing people would say if they could — is more real, in some sense, than what people do say. If you have given your imagination free rein, let things go as far as they want to go, the world they made for themselves while you watched can have, for you and later watchers, a spontaneous finality.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
"On Preparing to Read Kipling," introduction to The Best Short Stories of Rudyard Kipling (1961), p. 335
- work
- Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
- year
- 1935
- locator
- p. 335
Cite this record
“You often feel about something in Shakespeare or Dostoevsky …” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-14CB3D8264. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/14cb3d8264
More from Randall Jarrell
People always ask: For whom does the poet write? He needs only to answer, For whom do you do good? Are you kind to your daughter because in the end someone will pay you for being?... The poet writes his poem for its own sake, for the sake of that order of things in which the poem takes the place that has awaited it.
When you call people we you find it easy to be unfair to them, since you yourself are included in the condemnation.
And the world said, Child, you will not be missed. You are cheaper than a wrench, your back is a road; Your death is a table in a book. You had our wit, our heart was sealed to you: Man is the judgment of the world.