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

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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.
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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.
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I thought I heard the dark pounding its head On a rock, crying: Who are the dead?
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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.
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Experience means conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama.
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.
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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Dramatic experience is not logical it may be subdued to the kind of coherence that we indicate when we speak, in criticism, of form.
Allen Tate
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The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.
Allen Tate
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Poets, in their way, are practical men they are interested in results.
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.
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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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The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!
Allen Tate
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All the sea-gods are dead. You, Venus, come home To your salt maidenhead.
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There is a calm for you where men and women Unroll the chill precision of moving feet.
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I say that what one loves is best: The midnight fastness of the heart.
Allen Tate
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Men cannot live forever But they must die forever.
Allen Tate
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Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.
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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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