Quote

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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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
Believe
Rhythm
Measure
Keys
Term
Another
Modulation
Change
Denotes
Music
Uninterrupted
Without
Shift

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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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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.
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Let us begin to understand the argument. There is a solution to everything: Science.
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So face with calm that heritage And earn contempt before the age.
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The dusk runs down the lane driven like hail Far off a precise whistle is escheat To the dark and then the towering weak and pale.
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The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!
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The idiot greens the meadow with his eyes, The meadow creeps implacable and still A dog barks, the hammock swings, he lies. One two three the cows bulge on the hill.
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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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So the dubbed conceit Played nursery of cheat To clear the I of sleet.
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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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Men cannot live forever But they must die forever.
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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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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.
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We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.
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Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.
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All the sea-gods are dead. You, Venus, come home To your salt maidenhead.
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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!
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Struck in the wet mire Four thousand leagues from the ninth buried city I thought of Troy, what we had built her for.
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I have felt darkness lead me by the hand Over the hill to greet the singing dawn.
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Serious poetry deals with the fundamental conflicts that cannot be logically resolved: we can state the conflicts rationally, but reason does not relieve us of them.
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