Carolina QuotesButter not only wouldn’t melt in this mouth, it wouldn’t go in; one runs away, an urchin in the gutter and glad to be, murmuring: “The Queen of Spain has no legs.” … One’s eyes widen; one sits the poet down in the porch swing, starts to go off to get her a glass of lemonade, and sees her metamorphosed before one’s eyes into a new Critique of Practical Reason.., feminine gender...
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“Her Shield”, p. 178
- work
- Poetry and the Age (1953)
- year
- 1953
- locator
- p. 178
Cite this record
“Butter not only wouldn’t melt in this mouth, it wouldn’t go …” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-D4C76577AA. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/d4c76577aa
More from Randall Jarrell
A culture is no better than its woods,” Auden writes. Fortunately for him, a book of poetry can be better than its poems. Two-thirds of The Shield of Achilles is non-Euclidean needlepoint, a man sitting on a chaise longue juggling four cups, four saucers, four sugar lumps, and the round-square: this is what great and good poets do when they don’t even bother to write great and good poems, now that they’ve learned that — it’s Auden’s leitmotif, these days — art is essentially frivolous. But a little of the time Auden is essentially serious, and the rest of the time he’s so witty, intelligent, and individual, so angelically skillful, that one reads with despairing enthusiasm, and enjoys Auden’s most complacently self-indulgent idiosyncrasy almost as one enjoys Sherlock Holmes’s writing Victoria Rex on the wall in bullet holes.
Most works of art are, necessarily, bad...; one suffers through the many for the few.
A great revolution is hardest of all on the great revolutionists.