“Few poets have made a more interesting rhetoric out of just fooling around: turning things upside down, looking at them from under the sofa, considering them (and their observer) curiously enough to make the reader protest, “That were to consider it too curiously.””
“The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p. 64
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
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Randall Jarrell 215
poet, critic, novelist, essayist 1914–1965Related quotes
Oxford Companion to Children's Literature: "Charles Hamilton" (pages 235-7)
Ain't I a Woman? Speech (1851)
Sometimes misattributed to Astaire. In fact, it's just a scripted line (written by Blake Edwards and Larry Gelbart) from The Notorious Landlady. Astaire delivers the line to Jack Lemmon.
Misattributed
“Like a fool, I fell in love with you,
Turned my whole world upside down”
Source: Attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 257.
“It looks like poets will always have their work cut out for them.”
The Poet and the World (1996)
Context: Granted, in daily speech, where we don't stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like "the ordinary world," "ordinary life," "the ordinary course of events"… But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world.
It looks like poets will always have their work cut out for them.