Quote

For some reason most critics have a hard time fixing their minds directly under their noses, and before they see the object that is there they use a telescope upon the horizon to see where it came from.

Allen Tate

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Use
Horizon
Reason
Directly
Hard
Object
Mind
Critics
Time
Minds
Telescope
Objects
Telescopes
Came
Fixing
Upon
Noses

More quotes by Allen Tate

Image
The mission for the day is to encourage students to think beyond traditional career opportunities, prepare for future careers and entrance into the workplace.
Allen Tate
Image
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
Image
Venus knows country matters: country knows Venus: For Love, Dione's boy, was born on the farm.
Allen Tate
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Men cannot live forever But they must die forever.
Allen Tate
Image
We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.
Allen Tate
Image
Death's long anabasis.
Allen Tate
Image
Poets, in their way, are practical men they are interested in results.
Allen Tate
Image
Experience means conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama.
Allen Tate
Image
Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.
Allen Tate
Image
Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet.
Allen Tate
Image
Last night I fled until I came To streets where leaking casements dripped Stale lamplight from the corpse of flame A nervous window bled.
Allen Tate
Image
What was I saying? An Egyptian king Once touched long fingers, which are not anything.
Allen Tate
Image
I thought I heard the dark pounding its head On a rock, crying: Who are the dead?
Allen Tate
Image
Let us begin to understand the argument. There is a solution to everything: Science.
Allen Tate
Image
Among friends one has the privilege of saying nothing the civility consists in the assumption that one's silence will be civilly understood. I can imagine a small gathering of friends who say nothing all evening: they recoil from saying anything that the others don't want to hear and their silence would be the subtlest courtesy.
Allen Tate
Image
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.
Allen Tate
Image
There is a calm for you where men and women Unroll the chill precision of moving feet.
Allen Tate
Image
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.
Allen Tate