Quote

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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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
Black
Wild
Past
Guilt
Littles
Ten
Little
Sky
Must
Boys
Stinking
Love
Told
Whipped
Think
Lying
Rings
Thinking
Christ
Christmas

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I say that what one loves is best: The midnight fastness of the heart.
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Men cannot live forever But they must die forever.
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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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Our loss put six feet under ground Is measured by the magnolia's root Our gain's the intellectual sound Of death's feet round a weedy tomb.
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The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!
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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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Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.
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Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.
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we know our end A packet of worm-seed, a garden of spent tissues.
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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.
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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.
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The twilight is long fingers and black hair.
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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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What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.
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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.
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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.
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Venus knows country matters: country knows Venus: For Love, Dione's boy, was born on the farm.
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Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.
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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.
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Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker.
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