Quote

The idiot greens the meadow with his eyes, The meadow creeps implacable and still A dog barks, the hammock swings, he lies. One two three the cows bulge on the hill.

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
Eye
Swings
Hammocks
Three
Cows
Implacable
Two
Hills
Meadow
Stills
Idiot
Greens
Still
Dog
Meadows
Lies
Bark
Bulge
Eyes
Creeps
Hammock
Lying
Hill
Barks

More quotes by 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
So face with calm that heritage And earn contempt before the age.
Allen Tate
Image
Row after row with strict impunity The headstones yield their names to the element, The wind whirrs without recollection.
Allen Tate
Image
Venus knows country matters: country knows Venus: For Love, Dione's boy, was born on the farm.
Allen Tate
Image
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.
Allen Tate
Image
I thought I heard the dark pounding its head On a rock, crying: Who are the dead?
Allen Tate
Image
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.
Allen Tate
Image
Antiquity breached mortality with myths. Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates A cornice on the Third National Bank.
Allen Tate
Image
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.
Allen Tate
Image
I had kept opaque Down deeper than the canyons undersea The sullen spectrum of a buried lake Nobody saw not seen even by me.
Allen Tate
Image
So the dubbed conceit Played nursery of cheat To clear the I of sleet.
Allen Tate
Image
Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.
Allen Tate
Image
At twelve I was determined to shoot only For honor at twenty not to shoot at all I know at thirty-three that one must shoot As often as one gets the rare chance - In killing there is more than commentary.
Allen Tate
Image
We are afraid that we have not lived. We are not afraid of dying.
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
The torrent of the reaching shade Broke shadow into all its parts, What then had been of shadow made Found exigence in fits and starts.
Allen Tate
Image
I have felt darkness lead me by the hand Over the hill to greet the singing dawn.
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
Let us begin to understand the argument. There is a solution to everything: Science.
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