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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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Allen Tate
Age: 79 †
Born: 1899
Born: November 19
Died: 1979
Died: February 9
Author
Literary Critic
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Winchester
Kentucky
John Orley Allen Tate
Much
Banker
Bankers
Poets
Mysterious
Poet
Poetry

More quotes by Allen Tate

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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!
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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.
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We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.
Allen Tate
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What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.
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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.
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Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.
Allen Tate
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I say that what one loves is best: The midnight fastness of the heart.
Allen Tate
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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
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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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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.
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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.
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But we shall not know the world by looking at it we know it by looking at the hovering fly.
Allen Tate
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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.
Allen Tate
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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.
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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Poets, in their way, are practical men they are interested in results.
Allen Tate
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Men expect too much, do too little.
Allen Tate
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Antiquity breached mortality with myths. Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates A cornice on the Third National Bank.
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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Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.
Allen Tate