“These writers, plainly, lived in different worlds.”

—  Randall Jarrell

“The Obscurity of the Poet”, p. 17
Poetry and the Age (1953)
Context: Goethe said, “The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing”; Somerset Maugham says that the finest compliment he ever received was a letter in which one of his readers said: “I read your novel without having to look up a single word in the dictionary.” These writers, plainly, lived in different worlds.

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Randall Jarrell photo
Randall Jarrell 215
poet, critic, novelist, essayist 1914–1965

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