Carolina QuotesWhat to leave out is the first thing the artist has to decide; a painter who “held the mirror up to nature” would spend his life on the leaves of one landscape. The work of art’s fluctuating and idiosyncratic threshold of attention — the great things disregarded, the small things seized and dwelt on — is as much of a signature as anything in it.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“The Profession of Poetry”, p. 162
- work
- Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
- year
- 1935
- locator
- p. 162
Cite this record
“What to leave out is the first thing the artist has to decid…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-7553F1D9F6. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/7553f1d9f6
More from Randall Jarrell
Gertrude knew better than this, of course, but we all know better than we know better, or act as if we did.
How poet and public stared at each other with righteous indignation, till the poet said, “Since you won’t read me, I’ll make sure you can’t” — is one of the most complicated and interesting of stories.
The 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...