Allen Tate Quotes

66 Sourced Quotes

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
The shut gate and the decomposing wall:
The gentle serpent, green in the mulberry bush,
Riots with his tongue through the hush—
Sentinel of the grave who counts us all!

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

Allen Tate
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
Row after row with strict impunity
The headstones yield their names to the element,
The wind whirrs without recollection;
In the riven troughs the splayed leaves
Pile up, of nature the casual sacrament
To the seasonal eternity of death.

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

Allen Tate
Now remember courage, go to the door,
Open it and see whether coiled on the bed
Or cringing by the wall, a savage beast
Maybe with golden hair, with deep eyes
Like a bearded spider on a sunlit floor
Will snarl—and man can never be alone.

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

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

Allen Tate
Alice grown lazy, mammoth but not fat,
Declines upon her lost and twilight age;
Above in the dozing leaves the grinning cat
Quivers forever with his abstract rage.

Allen Tate
Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.

Allen Tate
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
What is the flesh and blood compounded of
But 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
They darted down and rose up like a wave
Or buzzed impetuously as before;
One would have thought the corpse was held a slave
To living by the life it bore!

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

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

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

Allen Tate
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
Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.

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

Allen Tate
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