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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.

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
Write
Geneticists
Happens
Psychologists
Doe
Psychologist
Come
Poem
Writing
Asked
Poetry
Question
Happen

More quotes by 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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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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Dark accurate plunger down the successive knell Of arch on arch, where ogives burst a red Reverberance of hail upon the dead Thunder like an exploding crucible!
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
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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
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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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Venus knows country matters: country knows Venus: For Love, Dione's boy, was born on the farm.
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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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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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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Poets, in their way, are practical men they are interested in results.
Allen Tate
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So face with calm that heritage And earn contempt before the age.
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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Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.
Allen Tate
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The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!
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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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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Men cannot live forever But they must die forever.
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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So the dubbed conceit Played nursery of cheat To clear the I of sleet.
Allen Tate