Quote

Men expect too much, do too little, Put the contraption before the accomplishment, Lack skill of the interior mind To fashion dignity with shapes of air. Luxury, yes but not elegance!

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
Skills
Elegance
Air
Accomplishment
Fashion
Skill
Littles
Luxury
Little
Lack
Much
Dignity
Contraption
Mind
Shapes
Interior
Men
Expect
Interiors

More quotes by Allen Tate

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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
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I thought I heard the dark pounding its head On a rock, crying: Who are the dead?
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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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The twilight is long fingers and black hair.
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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.
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The torrent of the reaching shade Broke shadow into all its parts, What then had been of shadow made Found exigence in fits and starts.
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Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet.
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Swimmer of noonday, lean for the perfect dive To the dead Mother's face, whose subtile down You had not seen take amber light alive.
Allen Tate
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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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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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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.
Allen Tate
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Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.
Allen Tate
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Struck in the wet mire Four thousand leagues from the ninth buried city I thought of Troy, what we had built her for.
Allen Tate
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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.
Allen Tate
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Death's long anabasis.
Allen Tate
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The Spring I seek is in a new face only.
Allen Tate
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Antiquity breached mortality with myths. Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates A cornice on the Third National Bank.
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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Dramatic experience is not logical it may be subdued to the kind of coherence that we indicate when we speak, in criticism, of form.
Allen Tate
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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