Quote

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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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
Social
Psychological
Three
Instance
Two
Morality
May
Conditions
Never
Alone
Quality
Less
Poem
History
Qualities

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Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.
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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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Walk in this faithless grass with studious tread, Lest mice, weasels, germane beasts, too soon The tall hat and eyes, the fierce feet, for dead Descry, and fix you prone in their revelling moon.
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Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.
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Let us begin to understand the argument. There is a solution to everything: Science.
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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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Punctilious abyss, the yawn of space Come once a day to suffocate the sight.
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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.
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For intellect is a mansion where waste is without drain.
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The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.
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Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet.
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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.
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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.
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Venus knows country matters: country knows Venus: For Love, Dione's boy, was born on the farm.
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What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.
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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.
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we know our end A packet of worm-seed, a garden of spent tissues.
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We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.
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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