Carolina QuotesWhen you’re young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“Reflections on Wallace Stevens”, p. 129
- work
- Poetry and the Age (1953)
- year
- 1953
- locator
- p. 129
Cite this record
“When you’re young you try to be methodical and philosophical…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-F0499FD486. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/f0499fd486
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.
[W.H.] Auden has gone in the right direction, and a great deal too far.
“Modern” poetry is, essentially, an extension of romanticism; it is what romantic poetry wishes or finds it necessary to become. It is the end product of romanticism, all past and no future; it is impossible to go further by any extrapolation of the process by which we have arrived, and certainly it is impossible to remain where we are — who could endure a century of transition?