Poetry and the Age: Expanded Edition Book

Because Jarrell was an aphoristic literary critic, the best way for those who haven't read him to see what he's like is to share a few of his aphorisms:

Emphasizing the poet over the poem is like "someone who, because he has inherited a pearl necklace, can never again look at an oyster without a shudder of awe."

"Surely it is the excellence most unlike our own that we will be most eager to acknowledge, since it not only extends but completes us ' and since only we, not the excellence, are harmed by our rejection of it."

"Readers, real readers, are almost as wild a species as writers; most critics are so domesticated as to seem institutions'as they stand there between reader and writer, so different from either, they remind one of the Wall standing between Pyramus and Thisbe."

"When you organize one of the contradictory elements out of your work of art, you are getting rid not just of it, but of the contradiction of which it was a part; and it is the contradictions in works of art which make them able to represent to us ... our world and our selves."