Carolina QuotesWe were given drinks, and drank them, and talked while we drank them. But talked, here, is a euphemism: we had that conversation about how you make a Martini. The people in Hell, Dr. Rosenbaum had told me once, say nothing but What? Americans in Hell tell each other how to make Martinis.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
Chapter 2: “The Whittakers and Gertrude”, p. 40
- work
- Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel]
- year
- 1954
- locator
- p. 40
Cite this record
“We were given drinks, and drank them, and talked while we dr…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-F228754DA2. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/f228754da2
More from Randall Jarrell
Let’s say this together: “Great me no greats”, and leave this grading to posterity.
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.
[Robert] Frost says in a piece of homely doggerel that he has hoped wisdom could be not only Attic but Laconic, Boeotian even — “at least not systematic”; but how systematically Frostian the worst of his later poems are! His good poems are the best refutation of, the most damning comment on, his bad: his Complete Poems have the air of being able to educate any faithful reader into tearing out a third of the pages, reading a third, and practically wearing out the rest.