Carolina Quotes...a [literary] style can be a whole way of existing, so that you exist, for the moment, in perfect sympathy with it: you don’t read it so much as listen to it as it sweeps you along — fast enough, often, to make you feel a blurred pleasure in your own speed. Often a phrase or sentence has the uncaring unconscious authority — how else could you say it? — that only a real style has.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“An Unread Book”, p. 36
- work
- The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
- year
- 1969
- locator
- p. 36
Cite this record
“...a [literary] style can be a whole way of existing, so tha…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-990A4C7ED1. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/990a4c7ed1
More from Randall Jarrell
...a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it...
“Modern” poetry is, essentially, an extension of romanticism; it is what romantic poetry wishes or finds it necessary to become. It is the end product of romanticism, all past and no future; it is impossible to go further by any extrapolation of the process by which we have arrived, and certainly it is impossible to remain where we are — who could endure a century of transition?
Many a writer has spent his life putting his favorite words in all the places they belong; but how many, like [E.E.] Cummings, have spent their lives putting their favorite words in all the places they don’t belong, thus discovering many effects that no one had even realized were possible?