Carolina QuotesIf you look at the world with parted lips and a pure heart, and will the good, won't that make a true and beautiful poem? One's heart tells one that it will; and one's heart is wrong. There is no direct road to Parnassus.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
"Recent Poetry," The Yale Review (Autumn 1955), p. 237
- work
- Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
- year
- 1935
- locator
- p. 237
Cite this record
“If you look at the world with parted lips and a pure heart, …” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-8BF3AAC9FA. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/8bf3aac9fa
More from Randall Jarrell
Nowadays 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.
In Heaven all reviews will be favorable; here on earth, the publisher realizes, plausibility demands an occasional bad one, some convincing lump in all that leaven, and he accepts it somewhat as a theologian accepts Evil.
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.