Carolina QuotesNowadays when a poet with one privately printed book can have his next three years taken care of by a Guggenheim fellowship, a Kenyon Review fellowship, and the Prix de Rome, it is hard to remember what chances the poet took in that small-town world, how precariously hand-to-mouth his existence was. And yet in one way the old days were better; [Vachel] Lindsay after a while, by luck and skill, got far more readers than any poet could get today.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“Fifty Years of American Poetry”, p. 299
- work
- The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
- year
- 1969
- locator
- p. 299
Cite this record
“Nowadays when a poet with one privately printed book can hav…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-6EA4173B65. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/6ea4173b65
More from Randall Jarrell
If 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.
A poem is sort of an onion of contexts, and you can no more locate any of the important meanings exclusively in a part than you can locate a relation in one of its terms. The significance of a part may be greatly modified or even in extreme cases completely reversed by later and larger parts and by the whole.
The usual bad poem in somebody’s Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and little emptier than, brushing one’s teeth.