Quote

Row after row with strict impunity The headstones yield their names to the element, The wind whirrs without recollection.

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
Element
Elements
Wind
Names
Headstone
Without
Impunity
Recollection
Strict
Yield

More quotes by Allen Tate

Image
Men expect too much, do too little.
Allen Tate
Image
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
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
Image
Let us begin to understand the argument. There is a solution to everything: Science.
Allen Tate
Image
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.
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
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
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.
Allen Tate
Image
For intellect is a mansion where waste is without drain.
Allen Tate
Image
I had kept opaque Down deeper than the canyons undersea The sullen spectrum of a buried lake Nobody saw not seen even by me.
Allen Tate
Image
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.
Allen Tate
Image
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.
Allen Tate
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Punctilious abyss, the yawn of space Come once a day to suffocate the sight.
Allen Tate
Image
we know our end A packet of worm-seed, a garden of spent tissues.
Allen Tate
Image
Now remember courage, go to the door,Open it and see whether coiled on the bedOr cringing by the wall, a savage beastMaybe with golden hair, with deep eyesLike a bearded spider on a sunlit floorWill snarl-and man can never be alone.
Allen Tate
Image
Walk in this faithless grass with studious tread, Lest mice, weasels, germane beasts, too soon The tall hat and eyes, the fierce feet, for dead Descry, and fix you prone in their revelling moon.
Allen Tate
Image
So face with calm that heritage And earn contempt before the age.
Allen Tate
Image
We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.
Allen Tate