Carolina QuotesOur universities should produce good criticism; they do not — or, at best, they do so only as federal prisons produce counterfeit money: a few hardened prisoners are more or less surreptitiously continuing their real vocations.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“Contemporary Poetry Criticism”, p. 62
- work
- Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
- year
- 1935
- locator
- p. 62
Cite this record
“Our universities should produce good criticism; they do not …” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-ED961391BC. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/ed961391bc
More from Randall Jarrell
There are some good things and some fantastic ones in Auden’s early attitude; if the reader calls it a muddle I shall acquiesce, with the remark that the later position might be considered a more rarefied muddle. But poets rather specialize in muddles — and I have no doubt which of the muddles was better for Auden’s poetry: one was fertile and usable, the other decidedly is not. Auden sometimes seems to be saying with Henry Clay, “I had rather be right than poetry”; but I am not sure, then, that he is either.
One thinks with awe and longing of this real and extraordinary popularity of hers [Edna St. Vincent Millay’s]: if there were some poet — Frost, Stevens, Eliot — whom people still read in canoes!
Somewhere there must be Something that's different from everything. All that I've never thought of — think of me!