Quote

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

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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
Alive
Swimmer
Face
Amber
Faces
Dive
Perfect
Lean
Mother
Swimming
Light
Whose
Take
Dead
Seen
Noonday

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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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I thought I heard the dark pounding its head On a rock, crying: Who are the dead?
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So the dubbed conceit Played nursery of cheat To clear the I of sleet.
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we know our end A packet of worm-seed, a garden of spent tissues.
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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.
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Death's long anabasis.
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Men cannot live forever But they must die forever.
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Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.
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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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Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.
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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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The Spring I seek is in a new face only.
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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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There is a calm for you where men and women Unroll the chill precision of moving feet.
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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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The poet is he who fights on the passionate Side and whoever loses he wins when he Is defeated it is hard to say who wins.
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In an age of abstract experience, fornication Is self-expression, adjunct to Christian euphoria, And whores become delinquents delinquents, patients Patients, wards of society. Whores, by that rule, Are precious.
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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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What was I saying? An Egyptian king Once touched long fingers, which are not anything.
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What is the flesh and blood compounded ofBut a few moments in the life of time?This prowling of the cells, litigious love,Wears the long claw of flesh-arguing crime.
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