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

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So face with calm that heritage And earn contempt before the age.
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Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.
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The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.
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Death's long anabasis.
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There's precious little to say between day and dark, Perhaps a few words on the implacable will Of time sailing like a magic barque Or something as fine for the amenities.
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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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Row after row with strict impunity The headstones yield their names to the element, The wind whirrs without recollection.
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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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But we shall not know the world by looking at it we know it by looking at the hovering fly.
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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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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?
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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.
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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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Ah, Christ, I love you rings to the wild sky And I must think a little of the past: When I was ten I told a stinking lie That got a black boy whipped.
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For intellect is a mansion where waste is without drain.
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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.
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!
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And I have seen long fingers that would stare With fiery eyes, and then the eyes would crawl Deftly across the counterpane and fall Soundless, with a wink of mild despair.
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Let us begin to understand the argument. There is a solution to everything: Science.
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I thought I heard the dark pounding its head On a rock, crying: Who are the dead?
Allen Tate