Carolina QuotesWe are all — so to speak — intellectuals about something.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“The Intellectual in America”, p. 11
- work
- A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)
- year
- 1962
- locator
- p. 11
Cite this record
“We are all — so to speak — intellectuals about something.” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-585DCFD917. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/585dcfd917
More from Randall Jarrell
If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Gödel believes Leibnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and systematically converting into poetry what we see and feel and are! When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems — people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensibility, and moral discrimination than most of the poets — it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, "Well, never mind. You're still the only one that can write poetry."
...it is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life.
The poets of the last generation were extremely erudite, but their erudition was of the rather specialized type that passed as currency of the realm in a somewhat literary realm. About Darwin, Marx, Freud and Co., about all characteristically “scientific” or “modern” thinkers most of them concluded regretfully: “If they had not existed, it would not have been necessary to ignore them.” (Or deplore them.)