Carolina QuotesDelmore carries such a petty, personally involved, New Yorkish atmosphere around with him it's almost unpleasant for me to see him. He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
Quoted in Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "Books of the Times," The New York Times (6 May 1985) . The quote is cited from a 1952 letter in Randall Jarrell's Letters: An Autobiographical and Literary Selection, ed. Mary Jarrell, assisted by Stuart Wright (Houghton Mifflin, 1985).
- year
- 1952
Cite this record
“Delmore carries such a petty, personally involved, New Yorki…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-B1E5AFC323. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/b1e5afc323
More from Randall Jarrell
We read our mail and counted up our missions — In bombers named for girls, we burned The cities we had learned about in school — Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among The people we had killed and never seen. When we lasted long enough they gave us medals; When we died they said, "Our casualties were low." They said, "Here are the maps"; we burned the cities.
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.
Early in his life Mr. [Ezra] Pound met with strong, continued, and unintelligent opposition. If people keep opposing you when you are right, you think them fools; and after a time, right or wrong, you think them fools simply because they oppose you. Similarly, you write true things or good things, and end by thinking things true or good simply because you write them