Allen Tate quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Allen Tate

Allen Tate Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Allen Tate on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Spring I seek is in a new face only.

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.

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

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

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.

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

The twilight is long fingers and black hair.

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

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.

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

Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.

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

Men expect too much, do too little.

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

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

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

Death's long anabasis.

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.

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 ...

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

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.

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.

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

Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet.

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

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

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 ...

Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.

The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!