“The motto of his [Robinson Jeffers’s] work is “More! More!”—but as Tolstoy says, “A wee bit omitted, overemphasized, or exaggerated in poetry, and there is no contagion”; and Frost, bearing him out, says magnificently: “A very little of anything goes a long way in a work of art.””

— Randall Jarrell

“Fifty Years of American Poetry”, pp. 322–323
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The motto of his [Robinson Jeffers’s] work is “More! More!”—but as Tolstoy says, “A wee bit omitted, overemphasized, or…" by Randall Jarrell?

Randall Jarrell 215

poet, critic, novelist, essayist 1914–1965

Related quotes

“A little bit goes a long way — it's true. And I sure am glad I went such a long, long way to find that out for myself.”

AnnaSophia Robb (1993) American actress, singer, and model

How I Spent My Summer Vacation (2008)

“Early rising, honesty, and work. There is a great difference in merit between being awakened and waking up someone else. Working in the shadows and praising others is honesty. If you do not put into practice what you hear, you will become a lie. Work on top of work, saying to yourself, ‘Just a little more, just a little bit more’; this is not greed, it is work that comes from true sincerity.”

Nakayama Miki (1798–1887) Founder of Tenrikyo

Anecdotes of Oyasama, Foundress of Tenrikyo, from Anecdote 111, "Being Awakened in the Morning," p. 94.
Anecdotes of Oyasama

“A painter makes patterns with shapes and colours, a poet with words. A painting may embody an ‘idea’, but the idea is usually commonplace and unimportant. In poetry, ideas count for a good deal more; but, […] the importance of ideas in poetry is habitually exaggerated: '… Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it.' [In poetry, ] the poverty of the ideas seems hardly to affect the beauty of the verbal pattern.”

G. H. Hardy book A Mathematician's Apology

A Mathematician's Apology (1941)

“Thou art a little soul bearing about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

IV, 41
Source: Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book IV

“There's nothing more prized to a man than something he had to wait for, work for, or strugle a little bit to get.”

Sherry Argov (1977) American writer

Source: Why Men Marry Bitches: A Woman's Guide to Winning Her Man's Heart

“My motto is, 'What's the hurry?' I'm trying to get it across to the modern world that we need to sit around and think a little bit more.”

Joe Strummer (1952–2002) British musician, singer, actor and songwriter

Interview with Corey Levitan for Rolling Stone Online on 2 December 1999.

“God is Nature in His being: that is to say, that Goodness that is Nature, it is God. He is the ground, He is the substance, He is the same thing that is Nature-hood. And He is very Father and very Mother of Nature: and all natures that He hath made to flow out of Him to work His will shall be restored and brought again into Him by the salvation of man through the working of Grace.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

Summations, Chapter 62

“Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him.”

Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) English crime writer, playwright, essayist and Christian writer

Essays, The Other Six Deadly Sins (1941)

“There's a reason for poetry… Poetry is a very nonlinear use of language, where the meaning is more than just the sum of the parts. And science requires that it be nothing more than the sum of the parts. And just the fact that there's stuff to explain out there that's more than the sum of the parts means that the traditional approach, just characterizing the parts and the relations, is not going to be adequate for capturing the essence of many systems that you would like to be able to do. That's not to say that there isn't a way to do it in a more scientific way than poetry, but I just like the feeling that culturally there's going to be more of something like poetry in the future of science.”

Christopher Langton (1949) American computer scientist

Christopher Langton, as quoted by John Horgan, The End of Science (1996) p. 201.

“The great rule: If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

E 55
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook E (1775 - 1776)

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Randall Jarrell 215

Related quotes

Related topics