Anyone who has read Yeats’s wonderful Autobiography will remember his Sligo — shabby, shadowed, half country and half sea, full of confused romance, superstition, poverty, eccentricity, unrecognized anachronism, passion and ignorance and the little boy’s misery. Yeats was treated well but was bitterly unhappy; he prayed that he would die, and used often to say to himself: “When you are grown up, never talk as grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood.”
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“The Development of Yeats’s Sense of Reality”, p. 89
- work
- Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
- year
- 1935
- locator
- p. 89
Cite this record
“Anyone who has read Yeats’s wonderful Autobiography will rem…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-650B626E71. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/650b626e71
More from Randall Jarrell
Individualism, isolation, alienation. The poet is not only different from society, he is as different as possible from other poets; all this differentness is exploited to the limit — is used as subject matter, even. Each poet develops an elaborate, “personalized”, bureaucratized machinery of effect; refine your singularities is everybody’s maxim.
[Kenneth Patchen] has a real, but disorganized, self-indulgent, but rather commonplace talent. This is not Mr. Patchen’s opinion of himself. (Nor is it that of William Carlos Williams, who almost invents a new language, a kind of system of emotional nonsense syllables, in his effort to praise Mr. Patchen properly. For instance, Mr. Patchen is “a hawk on the grave of John Donne.” I should have called him a parrot on the stones of half a cemetery.)
If Benton had had an administration building with pillars it could have carved over the pillars: Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you guilty.