Quote

Let us lie down once more by the breathing side Of Ocean, where our live forefathers sleep As if the Known Sea still were a month wide-- Atlantis howls but is no longer steep!

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
Stills
Ocean
Atlantis
Still
Months
Forefathers
Live
Longer
Steep
Side
Howl
Sides
Month
Sleep
Breathing
Known
Wide
Lying
Sea
Howls

More quotes by Allen Tate

Image
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.
Allen Tate
Image
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
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
The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.
Allen Tate
Image
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.
Allen Tate
Image
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
Image
According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for.
Allen Tate
Image
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
Image
Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker.
Allen Tate
Image
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
Image
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.
Allen Tate
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.
Allen Tate
Image
The Spring I seek is in a new face only.
Allen Tate
Image
So face with calm that heritage And earn contempt before the age.
Allen Tate
Image
we know our end A packet of worm-seed, a garden of spent tissues.
Allen Tate
Image
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
Image
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.
Allen Tate
Image
All the sea-gods are dead. You, Venus, come home To your salt maidenhead.
Allen Tate