Carolina QuotesImagism was a reductio ad absurdum of one or two tendencies of romanticism, such a beautifully and finally absurd one that it is hard to believe it existed as anything but a logical construction; and what imagist found it possible to go on writing imagist poetry? A number of poets have stopped writing entirely; others, like recurring decimals, repeat the novelties they commeced with, each time less valuably than before. And there are surrealist poetry, and political poetry, and all the othe refuges of the indigent.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“A Note on Poetry”, p. 50
- work
- Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
- year
- 1935
- locator
- p. 50
Cite this record
“Imagism was a reductio ad absurdum of one or two tendencies …” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-BFAF948F7E. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/bfaf948f7e
More from Randall Jarrell
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
[Robert] Frost says in a piece of homely doggerel that he has hoped wisdom could be not only Attic but Laconic, Boeotian even — “at least not systematic”; but how systematically Frostian the worst of his later poems are! His good poems are the best refutation of, the most damning comment on, his bad: his Complete Poems have the air of being able to educate any faithful reader into tearing out a third of the pages, reading a third, and practically wearing out the rest.
If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help.