Carolina QuotesIf you never look just wrong to your contemporaries you will never look just right to posterity — every writer has to try to be, to some extent, sometimes, a law unto himself.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“Three Books”, p. 230
- work
- Poetry and the Age (1953)
- year
- 1953
- locator
- p. 230
Cite this record
“If you never look just wrong to your contemporaries you will…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-68975448C6. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/68975448c6
More from Randall Jarrell
One of our universities recently made a survey of the reading habits of the American public; it decided that forty-eight percent of all Americans read, during a year, no book at all. I picture to myself that reader — that non-reader, rather; one man out of every two — and I reflect, with shame: "Our poems are too hard for him." But so, too, are Treasure Island, Peter Rabbit, pornographic novels — any book whatsoever.
The writer does not get from his work as he writes and reads it the same aesthetic shock that the reader does; and since the writer is so accustomed to reading other stories, and having them produce a decided effect upon him, he is disquieted at not being equally affected by his own.
Lending a favorite book has its risks; the borrower may not like it. I still don’t know a better novel than Crime and Punishment — still, every fourth or fifth borrower returns it unfinished: it depresses him; besides that, he didn’t believe it. More borrowers than this return the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past unfinished: they were bored. There is no book you can lend people that all of them will like.