Carolina QuotesWhen you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own; but to accept it because its stews taste exactly like your old mother’s hash, or to reject it because the owl-headed goddess of wisdom in its temple is fatter than the Statrue of Liberty, is an equal mark of that want of imagination, that inaccessibily to experience, of which each of us who dies a natural death will die.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“The Obscurity of the Poet”, p. 9
- work
- No Other Book: Selected Essays (1999)
- year
- 1999
- locator
- p. 9
Cite this record
“When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign cou…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-20F695CFBF. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/20f695cfbf
More from Randall Jarrell
When we read what Goethe says about men we are ashamed of what we have said; when we read what he says about painting and statues we are ashamed of what Goethe has said.
What Miss Moore’s best poetry does, I can say best in her words: it “comes into and steadies the soul,” so that the reader feels himself “a life prisoner, but reconciled.”
You 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.