Carolina QuotesIn Heaven all reviews will be favorable; here on earth, the publisher realizes, plausibility demands an occasional bad one, some convincing lump in all that leaven, and he accepts it somewhat as a theologian accepts Evil.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“Contemporary Poetry Criticism”, p. 59
- work
- Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
- year
- 1935
- locator
- p. 59
Cite this record
“In Heaven all reviews will be favorable; here on earth, the …” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-5B1F15250B. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/5b1f15250b
More from Randall Jarrell
Many young poets, nowadays, are insured against everything. For them poetry is a game like court tennis or squash racquets — one they learned at college — and they play it with propriety, as part of their social and academic existence; their poems are occasional verse for which life itself is only one more occasion.
A correct answer is like an affectionate kiss, Goethe said; a correct answer, Gertrude would have said, is like a slap in the face.
Ruskin says that anyone who expects perfection from a work of art knows nothing of works of art. This is an appealing sentence that, so far as I can see, is not true about a few pictures and statues and pieces of music, short stories and short poems. Whether or not you expect perfection from them, you get it; at least, there is nothing in them that you would want changed. But what Ruskin says is true about novels: anyone who expects perfection from even the greatest novel knows nothing of novels.