Carolina QuotesPoetry is a bad medium for philosophy. Everything in the philosophical poem has to satisfy irreconcilable requirements: for instance, the last demand that we should make of philosophy (that it be interesting) is the first we make of a poem; the philosophical poet has an elevated and methodical, but forlorn and absurd air as he works away at his flying tank, his sewing-machine that also plays the piano.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“Reflections on Wallace Stevens”, p. 127, originally in Partisan Review, Vol. 18, (May/June 1951)
- work
- Poetry and the Age (1953)
- year
- 1951
- locator
- p. 127
Cite this record
“Poetry is a bad medium for philosophy. Everything in the phi…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-5733B571C6. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/5733b571c6
More from Randall Jarrell
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.
One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.
A bat is born Naked and blind and pale. His mother makes a pocket of her tail And catches him. He clings to her long fur By his thumbs and toes and teeth. And then the mother dances through the night Doubling and looping, soaring, somersaulting — Her baby hangs on underneath.