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

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
Element
Elements
Wind
Names
Headstone
Without
Impunity
Recollection
Strict
Yield

More quotes by Allen Tate

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Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.
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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!
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Punctilious abyss, the yawn of space Come once a day to suffocate the sight.
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For intellect is a mansion where waste is without drain.
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But in our age the appeal to authority is weak, and I am of my age.
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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.
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The Spring I seek is in a new face only.
Allen Tate
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Men cannot live forever But they must die forever.
Allen Tate
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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.
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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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I have felt darkness lead me by the hand Over the hill to greet the singing dawn.
Allen Tate
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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.
Allen Tate
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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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All the sea-gods are dead. You, Venus, come home To your salt maidenhead.
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.
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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.
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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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Poets, in their way, are practical men they are interested in results.
Allen Tate
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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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Antiquity breached mortality with myths. Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates A cornice on the Third National Bank.
Allen Tate