Allen Tate Quotes

Death's long anabasis.

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

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

Men expect too much, do too little.

The Spring I seek is in a new face only.

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.

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

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!

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

The twilight is long fingers and black hair.

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

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

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

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

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 innocent mansion of a panther's heart!

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.

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

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!

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

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 ...

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

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

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.

Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.

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

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 ...

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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