Carolina QuotesAs Blake said, there is no competition between true poets.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“John Ransom’s Poetry”, p. 98
- work
- Poetry and the Age (1953)
- year
- 1953
- locator
- p. 98
Cite this record
“As Blake said, there is no competition between true poets.” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-48CC7C1DB5. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/48cc7c1db5
More from Randall Jarrell
We know from many experiences that this is what the work of art does: its life — in which we have shared the alien existences both of this world and of that different world to which the work of art alone gives us access — unwillingly accuses our lives.
When 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 Statue of Liberty, is an equal mark of that want of imagination, that inaccessibility to experience, of which each of us who dies a natural death will die.
In Stage II guilt is first of all social, liberal, moral guilt — a guilt so general as to seem almost formal. It is we who are responsible, either by commission or — more generally — by omission, for everything from killing off the Tasmanians to burning the books at Alexandria. (You didn’t do it? Then you should have stopped them from doing it. You never heard of it? Ignorant as well as evil, eh? You weren’t born? You’re guilty, I tell you — guilty.)