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Allen Tate Quotes
66 Sourced Quotes
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Let us begin to understand the argument.
There is a solution to everything: Science.
Allen Tate
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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
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I thought I heard the dark pounding its head
On a rock, crying: Who are the dead?
Allen Tate
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.
Allen Tate
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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
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What was I saying? An Egyptian king
Once touched long fingers, which are not anything.
Allen Tate
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Experience means conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama.
Allen Tate
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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
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Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker.
Allen Tate
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So face with calm that heritage
And earn contempt before the age.
Allen Tate
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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
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Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.
Allen Tate
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Quote of the day
Yet would we die as some have done: Beating a way for the rising sun.
Arna Bontemps
Allen Tate
Wikipedia
Born:
November 19, 1899
Died:
February 9, 1979
(aged 79)
Bio:
John Orley Allen Tate was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1943 to 1944.
Allen Tate on Wikipedia
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