Carolina Quotes...“progress”, in poetry at least, comes not so much from digesting the last age as from rejecting it altogether (or, rather, from eating a little and leaving a lot), and...the world’s dialectic is a sort of neo-Hegelian one in which one progresses not by resolving contradictions but by ignoring them.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“From That Island”, p. 30
- work
- Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
- year
- 1935
- locator
- p. 30
Cite this record
“...“progress”, in poetry at least, comes not so much from di…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-C0AFAEB0CA. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/c0afaeb0ca
More from Randall Jarrell
President Robbins was so well adjusted to his environment that sometimes you could not tell which was the environment and which was President Robbins.
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.
All his tunk-a-tunks, his hoo-goo-boos — those mannered, manufactured, individual, uninteresting little sound-inventions — how typical they are of the lecture-style of the English philosopher, who makes grunts or odd noises, uses homely illustrations, and quotes day in and day out from Alice, in order to give what he says some appearance of that raw reality it so plainly and essentially lacks. These “tootings at the wedding of the soul” are fun for the tooter, but get as dreary for the reader as do all the foreign words — a few of these are brilliant, a few more pleasant, and the rest a disaster: “one cannot help deploring his too extensive acquaintance with the foreign languages”, as Henry James said, of Walt Whitman, to Edith Wharton.