Carolina QuotesThe new masters paint a subject as they please, And Veronese is prosecuted by the Inquisition For the dogs playing at the feet of Christ, The earth is a planet among galaxies. Later Christ disappears, the dogs disappear: in abstract Understanding, without adoration, the last master puts Colors on canvas, a picture of the universe In which a bright spot somewhere in the corner Is the small radioactive planet men called Earth.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
"The Old and the New Masters," lines 53-61
- work
- The Lost World (1965)
- year
- 1965
Cite this record
“The new masters paint a subject as they please, And Veronese…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-F0FCA11C70. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/f0fca11c70
More from Randall Jarrell
In Stage II guilt is first of all social, liberal, moral guilt — a guilt so general as to seem almost formal. It is we who are responsible, either by commission or — more generally — by omission, for everything from killing off the Tasmanians to burning the books at Alexandria. (You didn’t do it? Then you should have stopped them from doing it. You never heard of it? Ignorant as well as evil, eh? You weren’t born? You’re guilty, I tell you — guilty.)
Anyone who has read Yeats’s wonderful Autobiography will remember his Sligo — shabby, shadowed, half country and half sea, full of confused romance, superstition, poverty, eccentricity, unrecognized anachronism, passion and ignorance and the little boy’s misery. Yeats was treated well but was bitterly unhappy; he prayed that he would die, and used often to say to himself: “When you are grown up, never talk as grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood.”
The characteristic poetic strategy of our time — refine your singularities — is something Auden has not learned; so his best poems are very peculiarly good, nearly the most interesting poems of our time. When he writes badly, we can afford to be angry at him, and he can afford to laugh at us.