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

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Punctilious abyss, the yawn of space Come once a day to suffocate the sight.
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Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet.
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Men cannot live forever But they must die forever.
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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.
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We are afraid that we have not lived. We are not afraid of dying.
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we know our end A packet of worm-seed, a garden of spent tissues.
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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.
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Experience means conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama.
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Let us begin to understand the argument. There is a solution to everything: Science.
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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There is a calm for you where men and women Unroll the chill precision of moving feet.
Allen Tate
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Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker.
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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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There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.
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For intellect is a mansion where waste is without drain.
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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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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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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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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Poets, in their way, are practical men they are interested in results.
Allen Tate