Allen Tate Quotes

Men expect too much, do too little.

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.

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.

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

Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!

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

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.

The twilight is long fingers and black hair.

The Spring I seek is in a new face only.

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.

Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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!

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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!

Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.