Life & Wisdom Quote by Randall Jarrell

Jarrell’s line is a pinprick aimed at a very particular mid-century American habit: mistaking one’s literary scene for the whole of civilization. The joke hinges on a willful category error. Friedrich Schiller and St Paul aren’t merely “important writers”; they’re pillars of radically different moral and aesthetic regimes - German idealism and early Christian theology - the kind of figures who make later centuries rearrange themselves. To demote them into “two Partisan Review editors” is to flatten the past into the scale of a small, caffeinated present.

Partisan Review wasn’t just a magazine; it was a gatekeeping machine for the New York intellectual world, famous for ideological feuds, status games, and the earnest conviction that history was happening on its pages. Jarrell’s barb targets the person who can’t imagine greatness outside that ecosystem, who reads culture as an intramural debate among familiar names, then retrofits the canon to match his social map. It’s provincialism dressed as sophistication.

The intent isn’t simply to sneer at pretension; it’s to expose the psychological comfort behind it. If Schiller is just another editor, then nothing is truly beyond you - not scale, not sanctity, not time. The subtext is anxiety: the fear that the past contains authorities you can’t outtalk, so you shrink them until they fit in your circle. Jarrell, a poet steeped in tradition, defends the older, larger idea of culture by ridiculing the modern impulse to make everything a magazine problem.