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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
Natures
Drama
Conflict
Means
Experience
Mean

More quotes by Allen Tate

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Among friends one has the privilege of saying nothing the civility consists in the assumption that one's silence will be civilly understood. I can imagine a small gathering of friends who say nothing all evening: they recoil from saying anything that the others don't want to hear and their silence would be the subtlest courtesy.
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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All the sea-gods are dead. You, Venus, come home To your salt maidenhead.
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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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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I believe the term modulation denotes in music the uninterrupted shift from one key to another: I do not know the term for change of rhythm without change of measure.
Allen Tate
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Poets, in their way, are practical men they are interested in results.
Allen Tate
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Serious poetry deals with the fundamental conflicts that cannot be logically resolved: we can state the conflicts rationally, but reason does not relieve us of them.
Allen Tate
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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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we know our end A packet of worm-seed, a garden of spent tissues.
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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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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For intellect is a mansion where waste is without drain.
Allen Tate
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So the poet, who wants to be something that he cannot be, and is a failure in plain life, makes up fictitious versions of his predicament that are interesting even to other persons because nobody is a perfect automobile salesman.
Allen Tate
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Men expect too much, do too little.
Allen Tate
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But in our age the appeal to authority is weak, and I am of my age.
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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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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Venus knows country matters: country knows Venus: For Love, Dione's boy, was born on the farm.
Allen Tate
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Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.
Allen Tate