Allen Tate Quotations

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.

What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.

Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.

The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.

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.

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.

Experience means conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama.

Dramatic experience is not logical; it may be subdued to the kind of coherence that we indicate when we speak, in criticism, of form.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But in our age the appeal to authority is weak, and I am of my age.

Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.

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.

The mission for the day is to encourage students to think beyond traditional career opportunities, prepare for future careers and entrance into the workplace.

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.

The Spring I seek is in a new face only.

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.

Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.

Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.

We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.

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....

Let us begin to understand the argument. There is a solution to everything: Science.

For intellect is a mansion where waste is without drain....

Antiquity breached mortality with myths. Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates A cornice on the Third National Bank.

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!

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.

Row after row with strict impunity The headstones yield their names to the element, The wind whirrs without recollection....

I have felt darkness lead me by the hand Over the hill to greet the singing dawn....

I thought I heard the dark pounding its head On a rock, crying: Who are the dead?

Struck in the wet mire Four thousand leagues from the ninth buried city I thought of Troy, what we had built her for.

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 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!

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.

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....

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.

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.

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.

But we shall not know the world by looking at it; we know it by looking at the hovering fly.

For often at Church I've seen the stained high glass Pour out the Virgin and Saints, twist and untwist The mortal youth of Christ astride an ass.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet.

William Blake cursed the flesh for a clod, Yet of some of his sayings we Moderns have heard tell: 'The nakedness of woman is the work of God', Or that title--The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

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....

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!

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.

The twilight is long fingers and black hair.

What was I saying? An Egyptian king Once touched long fingers, which are not anything.

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.

Punctilious abyss, the yawn of space Come once a day to suffocate the sight.

There's precious little to say between day and dark, Perhaps a few words on the implacable will Of time sailing like a magic barque Or something as fine for the amenities....

We are afraid that we have not lived. We are not afraid of dying.

Our loss put six feet under ground Is measured by the magnolia's root; Our gain's the intellectual sound Of death's feet round a weedy tomb.

Men cannot live forever But they must die forever....

I say that what one loves is best: The midnight fastness of the heart.

Death's long anabasis.

The dusk runs down the lane driven like hail; Far off a precise whistle is escheat To the dark; and then the towering weak and pale....

Venus knows country matters: country knows Venus: For Love, Dione's boy, was born on the farm.

we know our end A packet of worm-seed, a garden of spent tissues.

The day's at end and there's nowhere to go, Draw to the fire, even this fire is dying; Get up and once again politely lying Invite the ladies toward the mistletoe....

Peering, I heard the hooves come down the hill. The posse passed, twelve horse; the leader's face Was worn as limestone on an ancient sill.

Swimmer of noonday, lean for the perfect dive To the dead Mother's face, whose subtile down You had not seen take amber light alive.

Good manners, Madam, are had these days not For your asking, nor mine, nor what-we-used-to-be's. The day is a loud grenade that bursts a smile Of serious weeds in a comic lily plot....

In the cold morning the rested street stands up To greet the clerk who saunters down the world.

There is a calm for you where men and women Unroll the chill precision of moving feet.

My darling boy whom I shall never know, My son, I love you in my deepest fears....

So face with calm that heritage And earn contempt before the age.

Walk in this faithless grass with studious tread, Lest mice, weasels, germane beasts, too soon The tall hat and eyes, the fierce feet, for dead Descry, and fix you prone in their revelling moon.

Last night I fled until I came To streets where leaking casements dripped Stale lamplight from the corpse of flame; A nervous window bled.

I had kept opaque Down deeper than the canyons undersea The sullen spectrum of a buried lake Nobody saw; not seen even by me....

So the dubbed conceit Played nursery of cheat To clear the I of sleet....

All the sea-gods are dead. You, Venus, come home To your salt maidenhead....

POET If not in a place, where are the People weeping? LIBERAL They creep weeping in the face, not place. POET Is it something with which we may cope The weeping, the creeping, the peepee-ing, the peeping?

Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.

The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!

Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker.

Men expect too much, do too little.