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! 

The Art of Quotation (Part VIII)

My favorite form of quotation is the parenthetical extract. I learned it from reading Helen Vendler. It’s an effective way of illustrating a point. Here’s an example from Vendler’s “ ‘Oh I Admire and Sorrow,’ ” a review of Dave Smith’s poetry collection Cumberland Station (1977), included in her great Part of Nature, Part of Us (1980). She’s commenting on the poem “On a Field Trip at Fredericksburg”:

There are many daring flashes: the demotic beginning (“maybe / fifteen thousand got it here”); the surrealistic fantasy (“If each finger were a thousand of them / I could clap my hands and be dead / up to my wrists”); the dismissive meiosis for the atomic bomb (“one silly pod”); the substitution of birds for the soldiers in blue and gray uniforms (“a gray blur preserved / on a blue horizon”); the unobtrusive symbols (the drummers, “rigid as August dandelions,” yield to “one dark stalk snapped off,” and the hint of death in the “drift of wind / at the forehead, the front door”). 

I love this form of quotation. It embeds fragments of the subject text in the commentary. When done well, it’s the verbal equivalent of a Rauschenberg combine. 

The Art of Quotation (Part VII)

I’ve always admired the “fishnet” image that Robert Lowell used to describe his poetic endeavour. In his poem “Fishnet” (included in his 1973 collection The Dolphin), he wrote,

I’ve gladdened a lifetime

knotting, undoing a fishnet of tarred rope;

the net will hang on the wall when the fish are eaten,

nailed like illegible bronze on the futureless future.

Helen Vendler cherished these lines, too. She quoted them in two essays – “A Difficult Grandeur” (included in her 1980 collection Part of Nature, Part of Us) and “Images of Subtraction: Robert Lowell’s Day by Day” (in her 2010 collection Last Looks, Last Books). In the first piece, she quoted the above lines and offered this interpretation: 

The subjects of these poems will eventually become extinct, like all other natural species devoured by time, but the indelible mark of their impression on a single sensibility will remain, in Lowell’s votive sculpture, bronzed to imperishability.

I like how she reused Lowell’s “bronze,” converting it to “bronzed” – “bronzed to imperishability,” a wonderful phrase.

In the second essay, Vendler provided this interpretation of Lowell’s beautiful lines:

The poet’s net of forms in The Dolphin will remain, in his hammered phrase, “nailed like illegible bronze on the futureless future.”

Note the way she builds on Lowell’s “fishnet” and “bronze” metaphors – “the poet’s net of forms,” “his hammered phrase” – deepening their meaning. 

Credit: The above portrait of Helen Vendler is by Stephanie Mitchell. 

The Art of Quotation (Part VI)

Robert Macfarlane, in his brilliant The Old Ways (2012), says of the poet Edward Thomas,

The overlooked and the unnoticed attract him: the “flowers of rose-bay on ruinous hearths and walls” or “the long narrowing wedge of irises that runs alongside and between the rails of the South-Eastern and Chatham Railway,” almost into the heart of London.

The wonderful quotes are from Thomas’s journal. I like the way Macfarlane introduces them, briskly stating Thomas’s aesthetic (‘The overlooked and the unnoticed attract him”), then using a colon to adduce the examples. Macfarlane’s addition at the end (“almost into the heart of London”) is inspired!

Credit: The above photo of Robert Macfarlane is by Charlotte Hadden.

The Art of Quotation (Part V)

A. S. Byatt (Photo by Ozier Muhammad)

A. S. Byatt, in the Introduction to her essay collection On Histories and Stories (2000), wrote,

I should finally like to say something about the style of these essays. I quote extensively and at length. I tell the stories of books, I describe plots. When I first studied English, extensive quotation was a necessary part of the work of the critic. I. A. Richards showed his students that they were not really reading the words as they were written. He diagnosed and exposed stock responses. And whatever Leavis’s faults of dogmatic dismissal, irascibility prescriptiveness, he was a quoter of genius, and I increasingly look on my early readings of – and reading around, and following up of – those quotations as the guarantee, the proof, that we were all indeed engaged in the common pursuit of true judgment. 

She went on to say, “My quotations are like the slides in an art historical lecture – they are the Thing Itself.” 

Byatt was an extraordinary quoter: see, for example, her great “Van Gogh, Death and Summer” (included in her 1991 essay collection Passions of the Mind), in which she quotes passage after glorious passage from Van Gogh’s letters, celebrating his passionate love of color. 

The Art of Quotation (Part IV)

Jill Lepore (Photo by Stephanie Mitchell)

Jill Lepore, in her superb “The Shorebird” (The New Yorker, March 26, 2018; included in her 2023 collection The Deadline), makes an interesting move. Quoting from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, she uses the first line as an introduction to the rest of the excerpt. Here’s the passage:

Everything is connected to everything else, she showed. “We poison the caddis flies in a stream and the salmon runs dwindle and die,” Carson wrote:

We poison the gnats in a lake and the poison travels from link to link of the food chain and soon the birds of the lake margins become its victims. We spray our elms and the following springs are silent of robin song, not because we sprayed the robins directly but because the poison traveled, step by step, through the now familiar elm-leaf-earthworm cycle. These are matters of record, observable, part of the visible world around us. They reflect the web of life—or death—that scientists know as ecology.

The result is a neat in-sentence-block-quotation combo. 

The Art of Quotation (Part III)

Portrait of Madonna by Andrea Ventura

Joanna Biggs, in her superb “ ‘Give Me Joy’ ” (The New York Review of Books, May 23, 2024), a review of Mary Gabriel’s Madonna: A Rebel Life, writes,

The image of the whore was crystallized in Susan Seidelman’s 1985 movie Desperately Seeking Susan: Madonna played the eponymous Susan, strolling East Seventh Street and eating cheese puffs like an “indolent, trampy goddess,” as Pauline Kael put it in The New Yorker. 

The quote is from Kael’s “Passion” (The New Yorker, April 22, 1985; included in her wonderful 1985 collection State of the Art), in which she says, “Nobody comes through in the movie except Madonna, who comes through as Madonna (she moves regally, an indolent, trampy goddess)....” 

Kael’s “indolent, trampy goddess” is very good. Biggs’ “eating cheese puffs like an ‘indolent, trampy goddess’ ” is brilliant! Biggs takes Kael’s phrase and makes it her own. 

Postscript: Biggs’ piece contains another inspired line: 

Halfway through Sex there is a beautifully composed, and hot, picture of her leaning over a full-length mirror masturbating, watching her own cheeks bloom pink with orgasm. 

I nominate that as the best sentence of 2024 (so far). Biggs is one of today’s best critics. I’d like to see more of her in The New Yorker. 

The Art of Quotation (Part II)

Helen Vendler (Photo by Janet Reider)

One of the best quoters I’ve ever read is Helen Vendler. She ingeniously spliced quotation with commentary, creating miniature cabinet-of-wonders assemblages. This one, for example – from her brilliant “Notes from the Trepidarium,” a review of Lucie Brock-Broido’s Stay, Illusion:

The poet’s Gothic, so indispensable to her early work, has become “plain” in her flattened menagerie, in her taciturn journeys (“The train passed slowly through every belt we know: Prayer, Tornado, Bible, Grain”), in her description of a mummified bird placed in its owner’s purse “circa 1892” and hidden behind the chimney bricks in the Dumas Brothel Museum: “In your glass case now, canary.... // You are beautiful, grotesque.”

There are three types of quotation involved here. First, there’s the parenthetical “The train passed slowly through every belt we know: Prayer, Tornado, Bible, Grain.” Second, there’s the use of the tiny detail “circa 1892” to describe the mummified bird in the purse. And, third, following the colon, there’s the “In your glass case now, canary.... // You are beautiful, grotesque.” The combination makes for a delightfully strange sentence that went straight into my personal anthology of great quotation. 

The Art of Quotation (Part I)

Jonathan Kramnick, in his absorbing Criticism & Truth (2023), argues that quotation is a key element of critical writing. He says, “Much of literary criticism turns on the art of quoting well.” He sees quotation as a form of craft – “weaving one’s own words with words that precede and shape them.” I agree. Kramnick identifies two types of quotation – in-sentence quotation and block quotation. In-sentence quotation is “embedding language from a text within your sentences.” Block quotation is “setting off larger gobbets in block form.” In-sentence quotation is a form of weaving; block quotation is a form of mortaring. Both forms are creative: “The skilled practice of writing about writing makes something new in the act of interpreting it. It is fundamentally and irreducibly a creative act.”

It’s tonic to see these points being made. Not all critics are quoters. Edmund Wilson rarely quoted. He preferred paraphrase to quotation. But, for me, the best critics are the ones who quote extensively, e.g., John Updike, Helen Vendler, James Wood, Janet Malcolm, Dan Chiasson, Leo Robson. 

Updike included quotation as Rule #2 in his “Poetics of Book Reviewing”: “Give enough direct quotation – at least one extended passage – of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste” (Higher Gossip, 2011).

That’s one compelling reason for critics to quote. Another is to point something out. Mark O’Connell, in his review of James Wood’s The Fun Stuff, says, “When Wood block-quotes, you pay attention—as you would to a doctor who has just flipped an X-ray onto an illuminator screen—because you know something new and possibly crucial is going to get revealed" (“The Different Drummer,” Slate, November 2, 2012). This is an excellent description of Wood’s method. It’s a form of literary noticing. Kramnick calls it “fundamentally demonstrative and deictic: look at these lines, this moment; observe how they do this thing.” 

Seldom have I seen such a deep appreciation of quotation as Kramnick’s. He calls it an art, and he shows why. I applaud him.