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Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.

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
Perfection
Constant
Achieve
Study
Effort
Culture

More quotes by Allen Tate

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What was I saying? An Egyptian king Once touched long fingers, which are not anything.
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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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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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 twilight is long fingers and black hair.
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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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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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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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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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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Poets, in their way, are practical men they are interested in results.
Allen Tate
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POET If not in a place, where are the People weeping? LIBERAL They creep weeping in the face, not place. POET Is it something with which we may cope The weeping, the creeping, the peepee-ing, the peeping?
Allen Tate
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The day's at end and there's nowhere to go, Draw to the fire, even this fire is dying Get up and once again politely lying Invite the ladies toward the mistletoe.
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.
Allen Tate
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Experience means conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama.
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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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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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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Men expect too much, do too little.
Allen Tate