Carolina QuotesA poem is sort of an onion of contexts, and you can no more locate any of the important meanings exclusively in a part than you can locate a relation in one of its terms. The significance of a part may be greatly modified or even in extreme cases completely reversed by later and larger parts and by the whole.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“Texts from Housman”, p. 21
- work
- Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
- year
- 1935
- locator
- p. 21
Cite this record
“A poem is sort of an onion of contexts, and you can no more …” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-F2C6BF560F. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/f2c6bf560f
More from Randall Jarrell
...there is in this world no line so bad that someone won’t someday copy it.
Individualism, isolation, alienation. The poet is not only different from society, he is as different as possible from other poets; all this differentness is exploited to the limit — is used as subject matter, even. Each poet develops an elaborate, “personalized”, bureaucratized machinery of effect; refine your singularities is everybody’s maxim.
She said to Constance, parodying a line of poetry that attracted her, "In the United States, there one feels free." But she spoiled it by continuing, "Except from the Americans — but every pearl has its oyster."