Allen Tate Quotes

#1. 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.

Allen Tate

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

Allen Tate

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

Allen Tate

#4. 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

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

Allen Tate

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. We know our end
A packet of worm-seed, a garden of spent tissues.

Allen Tate

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

Allen Tate

#10. 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

#11. 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.

Allen Tate

#12. 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.

Allen Tate

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

Allen Tate

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

Allen Tate

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

Allen Tate

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

Allen Tate

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

Allen Tate

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. Men expect too much, do too little.

Allen Tate

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

Allen Tate

#22. 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

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

Allen Tate

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

Allen Tate

#25. 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!

Allen Tate

#26. 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

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

Allen Tate

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

Allen Tate

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

Allen Tate

#30. 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.

Allen Tate

#31. 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

#32. 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.

Allen Tate

#33. 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

#34. Death's long anabasis.

Allen Tate

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

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

Allen Tate

#39. Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.

Allen Tate

#40. Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet.

Allen Tate

#41. 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

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

Allen Tate

#43. 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 ...

Allen Tate

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

Allen Tate

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

Allen Tate

#46. 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

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

Allen Tate

#48. 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

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

Allen Tate

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

Allen Tate

#51. The twilight is long fingers and black hair.

Allen Tate

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

Allen Tate

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

Allen Tate

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

Allen Tate

#55. 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

#56. 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.

Allen Tate

#57. 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

#58. 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

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

Allen Tate

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

Allen Tate

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!

Allen Tate

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. 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.

Allen Tate

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

Allen Tate

#69. 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 ...

Allen Tate

#70. 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

#71. Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.

Allen Tate

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

Allen Tate

#73. The Spring I seek is in a new face only.

Allen Tate

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. 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