Carolina QuotesFirst one gets works of art, then criticism of them, then criticism of the criticism, and, finally, a book on The Literary Situation, a book which tells you all about writers, critics, publishing, paperbacked books, the tendencies of the (literary) time, what sells and how much, what writers wear and drink and want, what their wives wear and drink and want, and so on.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“ ‘Very Graceful Are the Uses of Culture’ ”, p. 211
- work
- Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
- year
- 1935
- locator
- p. 211
Cite this record
“First one gets works of art, then criticism of them, then cr…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-6D1B8A2DCC. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/6d1b8a2dcc
More from Randall Jarrell
One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.
When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own; but to accept it because its stews taste exactly like your old mother's hash, or to reject it because the owl-headed goddess of wisdom in its temple is fatter than the Statue of Liberty, is an equal mark of that want of imagination, that inaccessibility to experience, of which each of us who dies a natural death will die.
...a [literary] style can be a whole way of existing, so that you exist, for the moment, in perfect sympathy with it: you don’t read it so much as listen to it as it sweeps you along — fast enough, often, to make you feel a blurred pleasure in your own speed. Often a phrase or sentence has the uncaring unconscious authority — how else could you say it? — that only a real style has.