Politics & Power Quote by Randall Jarrell

Nothing spooks an American like etiquette performed with conviction. Jarrell’s line turns “manners” into a kind of horror genre: not the comforting social grease that keeps a room from squeaking, but a disciplined system of signals that implies rank, history, and exclusion. “None at all” sounds, in this frame, almost wholesome. Rudeness can be chalked up to honesty, youth, regional bluntness. English manners, by contrast, feel like a trap door: you can fall through it without ever being told the rules.

Jarrell is writing with a poet’s instinct for cultural pressure points, and also with a midcentury American’s itch about inheritance. Postwar America liked to imagine itself as the country that had escaped the Old World’s class scripts - a place where you could reinvent yourself with a new suit and a firmer handshake. English manners threaten that myth. They suggest that identity is not chosen but curated over generations, that your place is read in your vowels, your fork, your pause before a name. The fear isn’t that manners are strict; it’s that they’re legible to insiders and opaque to everyone else.

The wit lands because Jarrell reverses the usual hierarchy. We’re trained to think “having manners” is safer than not having them. He implies the opposite: that in a culture proud of informality, polished civility can look like surveillance. Manners become a soft-power weapon - polite, impeccable, and quietly terrifying.