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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!
Allen Tate
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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
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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
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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
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There is a calm for you where men and women Unroll the chill precision of moving feet.
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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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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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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So face with calm that heritage And earn contempt before the age.
Allen Tate
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Death's long anabasis.
Allen Tate
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For some reason most critics have a hard time fixing their minds directly under their noses, and before they see the object that is there they use a telescope upon the horizon to see where it came from.
Allen Tate
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Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet.
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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What is the flesh and blood compounded ofBut 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