Carolina QuotesThe round-square may be impossible, but we believe in it because it is impossible. [E.E.] Cummings is a very great expert in all these, so to speak, illegal syntactical devices: his misuse of parts of speech, his use of negative prefixes, his word-coining, his systematic relation of words that grammar and syntax don’t permit us to relate — all this makes him a magical bootlegger or moonshiner of language, one who intoxicates us on a clear liquor no government has legalized with its stamp.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“Fifty Years of American Poetry”, p. 321
- work
- The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
- year
- 1969
- locator
- p. 321
Cite this record
“The round-square may be impossible, but we believe in it bec…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-78D3072476. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/78d3072476
More from Randall Jarrell
Malraux writes in a language in which there is no way to say "perhaps" or "I don't know," so that after a while we grow accustomed to saying it for him.
We never step twice into the same Auden. — HERACLITUS
The motto of his [Robinson Jeffers’s] work is “More! More!” — but as Tolstoy says, “A wee bit omitted, overemphasized, or exaggerated in poetry, and there is no contagion”; and Frost, bearing him out, says magnificently: “A very little of anything goes a long way in a work of art.”