1.
Men expect too much, do too little.
Allen Tate
2.
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
3.
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
4.
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.
Allen Tate
5.
Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker.
Allen Tate
6.
Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.
Allen Tate
7.
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.
Allen Tate
8.
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
9.
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
10.
In the cold morning the rested street stands up
To greet the clerk who saunters down the world.
Allen Tate
11.
I have felt darkness lead me by the hand
Over the hill to greet the singing dawn.
Allen Tate
12.
So face with calm that heritage
And earn contempt before the age.
Allen Tate
13.
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.
Allen Tate
14.
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.
Allen Tate
15.
Experience means conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama.
Allen Tate
16.
Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.
Allen Tate
17.
The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!
Allen Tate
18.
But in our age the appeal to authority is weak, and I am of my age.
Allen Tate
19.
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
20.
The twilight is long fingers and black hair.
Allen Tate
21.
The Spring I seek is in a new face only.
Allen Tate
22.
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
23.
Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.
Allen Tate
24.
Row after row with strict impunity
The headstones yield their names to the element,
The wind whirrs without recollection.
Allen Tate
25.
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
26.
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
27.
Venus knows country matters: country knows Venus:
For Love, Dione's boy, was born on the farm.
Allen Tate
28.
But we shall not know the world by looking at it; we know it by looking at the hovering fly.
Allen Tate
29.
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
30.
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
31.
Antiquity breached mortality with myths.
Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates
A cornice on the Third National Bank.
Allen Tate
32.
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?
Allen Tate
33.
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!
Allen Tate
34.
The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.
Allen Tate
35.
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.
Allen Tate
36.
We are afraid that we have not lived.
We are not afraid of dying.
Allen Tate
37.
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.
Allen Tate
38.
I had kept opaque
Down deeper than the canyons undersea
The sullen spectrum of a buried lake
Nobody saw; not seen even by me.
Allen Tate
39.
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
40.
Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.
Allen Tate
41.
Struck in the wet mire
Four thousand leagues from the ninth buried city
I thought of Troy, what we had built her for.
Allen Tate
42.
I thought I heard the dark pounding its head
On a rock, crying: Who are the dead?
Allen Tate
43.
We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.
Allen Tate
44.
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!
Allen Tate
45.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet.
Allen Tate
46.
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.
Allen Tate
47.
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.
Allen Tate
48.
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
49.
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
50.
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.
Allen Tate