Carolina Quotes...just as great men are great disasters, overwhelmingly good poets are overwhelmingly bad influences.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p. 66
- work
- The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
- year
- 1969
- locator
- p. 66
Cite this record
“...just as great men are great disasters, overwhelmingly goo…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-96149FEB52. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/96149feb52
More from Randall Jarrell
A farmer is separated from a farmer By what farmers have in common: forests, Those dark things — what the fields were to begin with. At night a fox comes out of the forest, eats his chickens. At night the deer come out of the forest, eat his crops.
One of our universities recently made a survey of the reading habits of the American public; it decided that forty-eight percent of all Americans read, during a year, no book at all. I picture to myself that reader — that non-reader, rather; one man out of every two — and I reflect, with shame: "Our poems are too hard for him." But so, too, are Treasure Island, Peter Rabbit, pornographic novels — any book whatsoever.
It is odd how pleasant and sympathetic her poems are, in these days when many a poet had rather walk down children like Mr. Hyde than weep over them like Swinburne, and when many a poem is gruesome occupational therapy for a poet who stays legally innocuous by means of it.