Quote

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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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
Knowing
Poem
Talking
Manner
Words
Apart
Anything
Speaking
Neither
Poet
Reader
Says
Knower

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Antiquity breached mortality with myths. Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates A cornice on the Third National Bank.
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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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Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.
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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.
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So face with calm that heritage And earn contempt before the age.
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Experience means conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama.
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We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.
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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I say that what one loves is best: The midnight fastness of the heart.
Allen Tate
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The mission for the day is to encourage students to think beyond traditional career opportunities, prepare for future careers and entrance into the workplace.
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Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet.
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Row after row with strict impunity The headstones yield their names to the element, The wind whirrs without recollection.
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We are afraid that we have not lived. We are not afraid of dying.
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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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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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Death's long anabasis.
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Venus knows country matters: country knows Venus: For Love, Dione's boy, was born on the farm.
Allen Tate
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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.
Allen Tate
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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