Carolina QuotesCritics disagree about almost every quality of a writer’s work; and when some agree about a quality, they disagree about whether it is to be praised or blamed, nurtured or rooted out. After enough criticism the writer is covered with lipstick and bruises, and the two are surprisingly evenly distributed.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“Poets, Critics, and Readers”, p. 99
- work
- A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)
- year
- 1962
- locator
- p. 99
Cite this record
“Critics disagree about almost every quality of a writer’s wo…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-E1D2AD14D6. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/e1d2ad14d6
More from Randall Jarrell
I think Miss Moore was right to cut “The Steeple-Jack” — the poem seems plainer and clearer in its shortened state — but she has cut too much... The reader may feel like saying, “Let her do as she pleases with the poem; it’s hers, isn’t it?” No; it’s much too good a poem for that, it long ago became everybody’s, and we can protest just as we could if Donatello cut off David’s left leg.
Goethe said, “The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing”; Somerset Maugham says that the finest compliment he ever received was a letter in which one of his readers said: “I read your novel without having to look up a single word in the dictionary.” These writers, plainly, lived in different worlds.
Marx said that he had stood Hegel on his head; often Mr. [Horace] Gregory has simply stood Pollyana on her head.