Carolina Quotes...modern poetry is necessarily obscure; if the reader can’t get it, let him eat Browning...
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“Changes of Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden’s Poetry”, p. 149
- work
- The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
- year
- 1969
- locator
- p. 149
Cite this record
“...modern poetry is necessarily obscure; if the reader can’t…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-AC8283CB1A. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/ac8283cb1a
More from Randall Jarrell
...a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it...
The greatest American industry — why has no one ever said so? — is the industry of using words. We pay tens of millions of people to spend their lives lying to us, or telling us the truth, or supplying us with a nourishing medicinal compound of the two. All of us are living in the middle of a dark wood — a bright Technicolored forest — of words, words, words. It is a forest in which the wind is never still: there isn’t a tree in the forest that is not, for every moment of its life and our lives, persuading or ordering or seducing or overawing us into buying this, believing that, voting for the other.
We are all — so to speak — intellectuals about something.