Carolina QuotesHow poet and public stared at each other with righteous indignation, till the poet said, “Since you won’t read me, I’ll make sure you can’t” — is one of the most complicated and interesting of stories.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“The Obscurity of the Poet”, p. 12
- work
- Poetry and the Age (1953)
- year
- 1953
- locator
- p. 12
Cite this record
“How poet and public stared at each other with righteous indi…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-F2946D13FA. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/f2946d13fa
More from Randall Jarrell
The weight and concentration of the poems fall upon things (and those great things, animals and people), in their tough, laconic, un-get-pastable plainness: they have kept the stolid and dangerous inertia of the objects of the sagas — the sword that snaps, the man looking at his lopped-off leg and saying, “That was a good stroke.”
When you call people we you find it easy to be unfair to them, since you yourself are included in the condemnation.
We live in an age which eschews sentimentality as if it were a good deal more than the devil. (Actually, of course, a writer may be just as sentimental in laying undue emphasis on sexual crimes as on dying mothers: sentimental, like scientific, is an adjective that relates to method, not to matter.)