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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
Without
Impunity
Recollection
Strict
Yield
Element
Elements
Wind
Names
Headstone

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Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.
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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.
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There is a calm for you where men and women Unroll the chill precision of moving feet.
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The dusk runs down the lane driven like hail Far off a precise whistle is escheat To the dark and then the towering weak and pale.
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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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Therefore with idle hands and head I sit In late December before the fire's daze Punished by crimes of which I would be quit.
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For often at Church I've seen the stained high glass Pour out the Virgin and Saints, twist and untwist The mortal youth of Christ astride an ass.
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The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.
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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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How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.
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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.
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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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So face with calm that heritage And earn contempt before the age.
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All the sea-gods are dead. You, Venus, come home To your salt maidenhead.
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I have felt darkness lead me by the hand Over the hill to greet the singing dawn.
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Death's long anabasis.
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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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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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