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Men expect too much, do too little.

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
Men
Expect
Action
Littles
Little

More quotes by 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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Poets, in their way, are practical men they are interested in results.
Allen Tate
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The twilight is long fingers and black hair.
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I have felt darkness lead me by the hand Over the hill to greet the singing dawn.
Allen Tate
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Antiquity breached mortality with myths. Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates A cornice on the Third National Bank.
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We are afraid that we have not lived. We are not afraid of dying.
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The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.
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So the dubbed conceit Played nursery of cheat To clear the I of sleet.
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.
Allen Tate
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The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!
Allen Tate
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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.
Allen Tate
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Now remember courage, go to the door,Open it and see whether coiled on the bedOr cringing by the wall, a savage beastMaybe with golden hair, with deep eyesLike a bearded spider on a sunlit floorWill snarl-and man can never be alone.
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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All the sea-gods are dead. You, Venus, come home To your salt maidenhead.
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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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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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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Row after row with strict impunity The headstones yield their names to the element, The wind whirrs without recollection.
Allen Tate
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Men cannot live forever But they must die forever.
Allen Tate
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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