Carolina QuotesA successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad — and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
"Answers to Questions," from Mid-Century American Poets, edited by John Ciardi, 1950, p. 171
- work
- Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
- year
- 1935
- locator
- p. 171
Cite this record
“A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, w…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-FD2898723C. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/fd2898723c
More from Randall Jarrell
...most of the people in a war never fight for even a minute — though they bear for years and die forever. They do not fight, but only starve, only suffer, only die: the sum of all this passive misery is that great activity, War.
If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Gödel believes Leibnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and systematically converting into poetry what we see and feel and are! When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems — people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensibility, and moral discrimination than most of the poets — it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, "Well, never mind. You're still the only one that can write poetry."
If you never look just wrong to your contemporaries you will never look just right to posterity — every writer has to try to be, to some extent, sometimes, a law unto himself.