Top 79 Quotes & Sayings by Allen Tate
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American poet Allen Tate.
Last updated on November 21, 2024.
In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem.
Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.
A poem may be an instance of morality, of social conditions, of psychological history; it may instance all its qualities, but never one of them alone, nor any two or three; never less than all.
How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.
Men expect too much, do too little.
Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.
The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.
For some reason most critics have a hard time fixing their minds directly under their noses, and before they see the object that is there they use a telescope upon the horizon to see where it came from.
So the poet, who wants to be something that he cannot be, and is a failure in plain life, makes up fictitious versions of his predicament that are interesting even to other persons because nobody is a perfect automobile salesman.
Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.
The Spring I seek is in a new face only.
Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.
Serious poetry deals with the fundamental conflicts that cannot be logically resolved: we can state the conflicts rationally, but reason does not relieve us of them.
I believe the term modulation denotes in music the uninterrupted shift from one key to another: I do not know the term for change of rhythm without change of measure.
Experience means conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama.
At twelve I was determined to shoot only For honor; at twenty not to shoot at all; I know at thirty-three that one must shoot As often as one gets the rare chance - In killing there is more than commentary.
Narcissism and the Confederate dead cannot be connected logically, or even historically; even were the connection an historical fact, they would not stand connected as art, for no one experiences raw history.
What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.
We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.
The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!
But in our age the appeal to authority is weak, and I am of my age.
Dramatic experience is not logical; it may be subdued to the kind of coherence that we indicate when we speak, in criticism, of form.
The mission for the day is to encourage students to think beyond traditional career opportunities, prepare for future careers and entrance into the workplace.
I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.
According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for.
There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.
We are afraid that we have not lived.
We are not afraid of dying.
What was I saying? An Egyptian king
Once touched long fingers, which are not anything.
Ah, Christ, I love you rings to the wild sky
And I must think a little of the past:
When I was ten I told a stinking lie
That got a black boy whipped.
What is the flesh and blood compounded ofBut a few moments in the life of time?This prowling of the cells, litigious love,Wears the long claw of flesh-arguing crime.
The poet is he who fights on the passionate
Side and whoever loses he wins; when he
Is defeated it is hard to say who wins.
Venus knows country matters: country knows Venus:
For Love, Dione's boy, was born on the farm.
The idiot greens the meadow with his eyes,
The meadow creeps implacable and still;
A dog barks, the hammock swings, he lies.
One two three the cows bulge on the hill.
But we shall not know the world by looking at it; we know it by looking at the hovering fly.
Row after row with strict impunity
The headstones yield their names to the element,
The wind whirrs without recollection.
Men cannot live forever
But they must die forever.
Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker.
Now remember courage, go to the door,Open it and see whether coiled on the bedOr cringing by the wall, a savage beastMaybe with golden hair, with deep eyesLike a bearded spider on a sunlit floorWill snarl-and man can never be alone.
Dark accurate plunger down the successive knell
Of arch on arch, where ogives burst a red
Reverberance of hail upon the dead
Thunder like an exploding crucible!
Men expect too much, do too little,
Put the contraption before the accomplishment,
Lack skill of the interior mind
To fashion dignity with shapes of air.
Luxury, yes but not elegance!
Antiquity breached mortality with myths.
Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates
A cornice on the Third National Bank.
For intellect is a mansion where waste is without drain.
I have felt darkness lead me by the hand
Over the hill to greet the singing dawn.
Punctilious abyss, the yawn of space
Come once a day to suffocate the sight.
The torrent of the reaching shade
Broke shadow into all its parts,
What then had been of shadow made
Found exigence in fits and starts.
There is a calm for you where men and women
Unroll the chill precision of moving feet.
Therefore with idle hands and head I sit
In late December before the fire's daze
Punished by crimes of which I would be quit.
So face with calm that heritage
And earn contempt before the age.
Among friends one has the privilege of saying nothing; the civility consists in the assumption that one's silence will be civilly understood. I can imagine a small gathering of friends who say nothing all evening: they recoil from saying anything that the others don't want to hear; and their silence would be the subtlest courtesy.
The dreary flies, lazy and casual,
Stick to the ceiling, buzz along the wall.
O heart, the spider shuffles from the mould
Weaving, between the pinks and grapes, his pall.
Let us begin to understand the argument.
There is a solution to everything: Science.
we know our end
A packet of worm-seed, a garden of spent tissues.
Let us lie down once more by the breathing side
Of Ocean, where our live forefathers sleep
As if the Known Sea still were a month wide--
Atlantis howls but is no longer steep!
The twilight is long fingers and black hair.
I thought I heard the dark pounding its head
On a rock, crying: Who are the dead?
In an age of abstract experience, fornication
Is self-expression, adjunct to Christian euphoria,
And whores become delinquents; delinquents, patients;
Patients, wards of society. Whores, by that rule,
Are precious.
Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.
Struck in the wet mire
Four thousand leagues from the ninth buried city
I thought of Troy, what we had built her for.
And I have seen long fingers that would stare
With fiery eyes, and then the eyes would crawl
Deftly across the counterpane and fall
Soundless, with a wink of mild despair.
I had kept opaque
Down deeper than the canyons undersea
The sullen spectrum of a buried lake
Nobody saw; not seen even by me.
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