Carolina Quotes...Stevens does not think of inspiration (or whatever you want to call it) as a condition of composition. He too is waiting for the spark from heaven to fall — poets have no choice about this — but he waits writing; and this — other things being equal, when it’s possible, if it’s possible — is the best way for a poet to wait.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p. 66
- work
- The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
- year
- 1969
- locator
- p. 66
Cite this record
“...Stevens does not think of inspiration (or whatever you wa…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-5FFF2928FA. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/5fff2928fa
More from Randall Jarrell
How poet and public stared at each other with righteous indignation, till the poet said, “Since you won’t read me, I’ll make sure you can’t” — is one of the most complicated and interesting of stories.
...we are willing to admit the normality of the abnormal — are willing to admit that we never understood the normal better than when it has been allowed to reach its full growth and become the abnormal.
...good American poets are surprisingly individual and independent; they have little of the member-of-the-Academy, official man-of-letters feel that English or continental poets often have. When American poets join literary political parties, doctrinaire groups with immutable principles, whose poems themselves are manifestoes, the poets are ruined by it. We see this in the beatniks, with their official theory that you write a poem by putting down anything that happens to come into your head; this iron spontaneity of theirs makes it impossible for even a talented beatnik to write a good poem except by accident, since it eliminates the selection, exclusion, and concentration that are an essential part of writing a poem. Besides, their poems are as direct as true works of art are indirect: ironically, these conscious social manifestoes of theirs, these bohemian public speeches, make it impossible for the artist’s unconscious to operate as it normally does in the process of producing a work of art.