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So the poet, who wants to be something that he cannot be, and is a failure in plain life, makes up fictitious versions of his predicament that are interesting even to other persons because nobody is a perfect automobile salesman.

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
Cannot
Versions
Persons
Poet
Failure
Fictitious
Even
Nobody
Predicament
Something
Wants
Predicaments
Life
Interesting
Salesman
Perfect
Automobile
Makes
Plain

More quotes by Allen Tate

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Let us begin to understand the argument. There is a solution to everything: Science.
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For intellect is a mansion where waste is without drain.
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Men cannot live forever But they must die forever.
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In the cold morning the rested street stands up To greet the clerk who saunters down the world.
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The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!
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Punctilious abyss, the yawn of space Come once a day to suffocate the sight.
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Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.
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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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Antiquity breached mortality with myths. Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates A cornice on the Third National Bank.
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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.
Allen Tate
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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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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
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The Spring I seek is in a new face only.
Allen Tate
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The twilight is long fingers and black hair.
Allen Tate
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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.
Allen Tate
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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.
Allen Tate
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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.
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I thought I heard the dark pounding its head On a rock, crying: Who are the dead?
Allen Tate
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My darling boy whom I shall never know, My son, I love you in my deepest fears.
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