Carolina QuotesThe poet needs to be deluded about his poems — for who can be sure that it is delusion? In his strongest hours the public hardly exists for the writer; he does what he ought to do, has to do, and if afterwards some Public wishes to come and crown him with laurel crowns, well, let it! if critics wish to tell people all that he isn’t, well, let them — he knows what he is. But at night when he can’t get to sleep it seems to him that it is what he is, his own particular personal quality, that he is being disliked for. It is this that the future will like him for, if it likes him for anything; but will it like him for anything? The poet’s hope is in posterity, but it is a pale hope; and now that posterity itself has become a pale hope...
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“Poets, Critics, and Readers”, p. 109
- work
- A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)
- year
- 1962
- locator
- p. 109
Cite this record
“The poet needs to be deluded about his poems — for who can b…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-602412E556. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/602412e556
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Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we shall know everything the eighteenth century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.
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