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

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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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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.
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Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.
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The twilight is long fingers and black hair.
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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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The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!
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Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet.
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So the dubbed conceit Played nursery of cheat To clear the I of sleet.
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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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What was I saying? An Egyptian king Once touched long fingers, which are not anything.
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Venus knows country matters: country knows Venus: For Love, Dione's boy, was born on the farm.
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William Blake cursed the flesh for a clod, Yet of some of his sayings we Moderns have heard tell: 'The nakedness of woman is the work of God', Or that title--The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
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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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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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Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.
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Men expect too much, do too little.
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Death's long anabasis.
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What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.
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Let us begin to understand the argument. There is a solution to everything: Science.
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Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.
Allen Tate