Carolina Quotes[Robert] Frost says in a piece of homely doggerel that he has hoped wisdom could be not only Attic but Laconic, Boeotian even — “at least not systematic”; but how systematically Frostian the worst of his later poems are! His good poems are the best refutation of, the most damning comment on, his bad: his Complete Poems have the air of being able to educate any faithful reader into tearing out a third of the pages, reading a third, and practically wearing out the rest.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“To the Laodiceans”, p. 21
- work
- No Other Book: Selected Essays (1999)
- year
- 1999
- locator
- p. 21
Cite this record
“[Robert] Frost says in a piece of homely doggerel that he ha…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-7BA5C7E627. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/7ba5c7e627
More from Randall Jarrell
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.”
Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so.
...“progress”, in poetry at least, comes not so much from digesting the last age as from rejecting it altogether (or, rather, from eating a little and leaving a lot), and...the world’s dialectic is a sort of neo-Hegelian one in which one progresses not by resolving contradictions but by ignoring them.