Quote #43
Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we shall know everything the eighteenth century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.
More from Randall Jarrell
- A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental wh…
- Malraux writes in a language in which there is no way to say 'perhaps' or 'I don't know,' so that after a while we grow accustomed to sayin…
- It is better to have the child in the chimney corner moved by what happens in the poem, in spite of his ignorance of its real meaning, than…
- Many young poets, nowadays, are insured against everything. For them poetry is a game like court tennis or squash racquets - one they learn…
- One is forced to remember how far from 'self-expression' great poems are - what a strange compromise between the demands of the self, the w…
- Underneath all his writing there is the settled determination to use certain words, to take certain attitudes, to produce a certain atmosph…
- We know from many experiences that this is what the work of art does: its life - in which we have shared the alien existences both of this …
- If you look at the world with parted lips and a pure heart, and will the good, won't that make a true and beautiful poem? One's heart tells…