Carolina Quotes[IRENE ROSENBAUM:] ...“you Americans do not rear children, you incite them; you give them food and shelter and applause”...
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
Chapter 4, p. 180
- work
- Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel]
- year
- 1954
- locator
- p. 180
Cite this record
“[IRENE ROSENBAUM:] ...“you Americans do not rear children, y…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-ECF5398A6E. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/ecf5398a6e
More from Randall Jarrell
Nowadays when a poet with one privately printed book can have his next three years taken care of by a Guggenheim fellowship, a Kenyon Review fellowship, and the Prix de Rome, it is hard to remember what chances the poet took in that small-town world, how precariously hand-to-mouth his existence was. And yet in one way the old days were better; [Vachel] Lindsay after a while, by luck and skill, got far more readers than any poet could get today.
...one straggles gracelessly through a wilderness of common sense. It is an experience for which the reader of modern criticism is unprepared: in that jungle through which one wanders, with its misshapen and extravagant and cannibalistic growths, bent double with fruit and tentacles, disquieting with their rank eccentric life, one comes surprisingly on something so palely healthy: a decorous plant, without thorns or flowers, rootless in the thin sand of the drawing room.
One of the most puzzling things about a novel is that “the way it really was” half the time is, and half the time isn’t, the way it ought to be in the novel.