Carolina QuotesThe usual bad poem in somebody’s Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and little emptier than, brushing one’s teeth.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“William Carlos Williams”, p. 216
- work
- Poetry and the Age (1953)
- year
- 1953
- locator
- p. 216
Cite this record
“The usual bad poem in somebody’s Collected Works is a learne…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-232C690123. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/232c690123
More from Randall Jarrell
The writer does not get from his work as he writes and reads it the same aesthetic shock that the reader does; and since the writer is so accustomed to reading other stories, and having them produce a decided effect upon him, he is disquieted at not being equally affected by his own.
Christina Stead has a Chinese say, “Our old age is perhaps life’s decision about us” — or, worse, the decision we have made about ourselves without ever realizing we were making it.
Our universities should produce good criticism; they do not — or, at best, they do so only as federal prisons produce counterfeit money: a few hardened prisoners are more or less surreptitiously continuing their real vocations.