Allen Tate famous quotes

Men expect too much, do too little.
-- Allen Tate

#Men #Littles #Too Much

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

#Poetry #Bankers #Mysterious

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

#Encouragement #Opportunity #Thinking

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

#Age #Glitter #Weak

The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!
-- Allen Tate

#Heart #Panthers #Innocence

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.
-- Allen Tate

#Change #Believe #Keys

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.
-- Allen Tate

#Ambition #Doctors #Desire

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.
-- Allen Tate

#Dream #Three #May

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.
-- Allen Tate

#Wall #Men #Hair

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.
-- Allen Tate

#Art #Historical #Connections

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.
-- Allen Tate

#Honor #Twenties #Twelve

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

#Criticism #Experience #May

Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.
-- Allen Tate

#Psychological #Theory #Deals

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

#Drama #Mean #Conflict

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.
-- Allen Tate

#Writing #Doe #Psychologist

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

#Perfection #Effort #Culture

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.
-- Allen Tate

#Two #Quality #Three

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

#Particular

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.
-- Allen Tate

#Art #Mean #Years

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

#Real #May #Critics

The Spring I seek is in a new face only.
-- Allen Tate

#Spring #Faces

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

#World #Hovering

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.
-- Allen Tate

#Cells #Blood #Long

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

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.
-- Allen Tate

#Perfect #Interesting #Want

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.
-- Allen Tate

#Doe #Fundamentals #Serious

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

#Men #Way #Poet

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

#Detachment #Theory

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.
-- Allen Tate

#Hard Times #Mind #Horizon

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.
-- Allen Tate

#Friendship #Silence #Want

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.
-- Allen Tate

#Talking #Knowing #Poet

Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.
-- Allen Tate

#Religion #Technique #Sole