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

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
Mean
Natures
Drama
Conflict
Means
Experience

More quotes by Allen Tate

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I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.
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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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.
Allen Tate
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Men expect too much, do too little.
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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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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The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!
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!
Allen Tate
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The dreary flies, lazy and casual, Stick to the ceiling, buzz along the wall. O heart, the spider shuffles from the mould Weaving, between the pinks and grapes, his pall.
Allen Tate
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We are afraid that we have not lived. We are not afraid of dying.
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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we know our end A packet of worm-seed, a garden of spent tissues.
Allen Tate
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Struck in the wet mire Four thousand leagues from the ninth buried city I thought of Troy, what we had built her for.
Allen Tate
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The twilight is long fingers and black hair.
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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I thought I heard the dark pounding its head On a rock, crying: Who are the dead?
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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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.
Allen Tate
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So face with calm that heritage And earn contempt before the age.
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