Carolina QuotesThe usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“An Unread Book”, p. 20
- work
- The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
- year
- 1969
- locator
- p. 20
Cite this record
“The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no m…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-47526C1A9C. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/47526c1a9c
More from Randall Jarrell
The ways we miss our lives are life.
It is odd how pleasant and sympathetic her poems are, in these days when many a poet had rather walk down children like Mr. Hyde than weep over them like Swinburne, and when many a poem is gruesome occupational therapy for a poet who stays legally innocuous by means of it.
“My destiny is accomplished and I die content.” How often she made such quotations as these, said or felt or was them! For just as many Americans want art to be Life, so this American novelist wanted life to be Art, not seeing that many of the values — though not, perhaps, the final ones — of life and art are irreconcilable; so that her life looked coldly into the mirror that it held up to itself, and saw that it was full of quotations, of data and analysis and epigrams, of naked and shameful truths, of facts: it saw that it was a novel by Gertrude Johnson.