Carolina QuotesOnce man was tossed about helplessly and incessantly by the wind that blew through him — now the toughest of all plants is more sensitive, more easily moved than he. In other words, death is better than life, nothing is better than anything. Nor is this a silly adolescent pessimism peculiar to Housman, as so many critics assure you. It is better to be dead than alive, best of all never to have been born — said a poet approvingly advertised as seeing life steadily and seeing it whole; and if I began an anthology of such quotations there it would take me a long time to finish. The attitude is obviously inadequate and just as obviously important.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“Texts from Housman”, p. 27
- work
- Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
- year
- 1935
- locator
- p. 27
Cite this record
“Once man was tossed about helplessly and incessantly by the …” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-3B027F8F82. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/3b027f8f82
More from Randall Jarrell
...Stevens does not think of inspiration (or whatever you want to call it) as a condition of composition. He too is waiting for the spark from heaven to fall — poets have no choice about this — but he waits writing; and this — other things being equal, when it’s possible, if it’s possible — is the best way for a poet to wait.
At night there are no more farmers, no more farms. At night the fields dream, the fields are the forest. The boy stands looking at the fox As if, if he looked long enough — he looks at it. Or is it the fox is looking at the boy? The trees can't tell the two of them apart.
What we are most anxious about is our anxiety itself: the greatest of all sins, Auden learns from Kafka, is impatience — and he decides that the hero “is, in fact, one who is not anxious.” But it was inevitable that Auden should arrive at this point. His anxiety is fundamental; and the one thing that anxiety cannot do is to accept itself, to do nothing about itself — consequently it admires more than anything else in the world doing nothing, sitting still, waiting.