Carolina Quotes...a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it...
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“An Unread Book”, p. 50
- work
- The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
- year
- 1969
- locator
- p. 50
Cite this record
“...a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has some…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-2947C412B8. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/2947c412b8
More from Randall Jarrell
It is G.E. Moore at the spinet.
The motto of his [Robinson Jeffers’s] work is “More! More!” — but as Tolstoy says, “A wee bit omitted, overemphasized, or exaggerated in poetry, and there is no contagion”; and Frost, bearing him out, says magnificently: “A very little of anything goes a long way in a work of art.”
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.