The Art of Quotation (Part IX)

Randall Jarrell (portrait from poemanalysis.com)

One of the most memorable essays I’ve ever read is Randall Jarrell’s “Some Lines from Whitman” (included in his 1953 collection Poetry and the Age). The piece is almost all quotation! Jarrell says, “To show Whitman for what he is one does not need to praise or explain or argue, one needs simply to quote.” And that’s exactly what he does. Here’s a sample:

Even a few of his phrases are enough to show us that Whitman was no sweeping rhetorician, but a poet of the greatest and oddest delicacy and originality and sensitivity, so far as words are concerned. This is, after all, the poet who said, “Blind loving wrestling touch, sheath’d hooded sharp-tooth’d touch”; who said, “Smartly attired, countenance smiling, form upright, death under the breast-bones, hell under the skull-bones”; who said, “Agonies are one of my changes of garments”; who saw grass as the “flag of my disposition,” saw “the sharp-peak’d farmhouse, with its scallop’d scum and slender shoots from the gutters,” heard a plane’s “wild ascending lisp,” and saw and heard how at the amputation “what is removed drops horribly in a pail.” 

Jarrell goes on like this for a couple of pages and then shifts from quoting phrases to quoting passages. At one point, he asks, “How can one quote enough?” Abundance of quotation is Jarrell’s way of arguing for Whitman’s genius. It's a brilliant method!