Allen Tate Quotes

66 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Allen Tate
Let us begin to understand the argument.
There is a solution to everything: Science.

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

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

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

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

Allen Tate
Scientific approaches, because each has its own partial conventions momentarily arrogating to themselves the authority of total explanation, must invariably fail to see all the experience latent in the work.

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

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

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

Allen Tate