Quote

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.

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
Ground
Measured
Intellectual
Root
Loss
Round
Feet
Rounds
Weedy
Sound
Gain
Magnolia
Death
Six
Magnolias
Gains
Tomb
Roots
Tombs

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Poets, in their way, are practical men they are interested in results.
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The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.
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Now remember courage, go to the door,Open it and see whether coiled on the bedOr cringing by the wall, a savage beastMaybe with golden hair, with deep eyesLike a bearded spider on a sunlit floorWill snarl-and man can never be alone.
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we know our end A packet of worm-seed, a garden of spent tissues.
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All the sea-gods are dead. You, Venus, come home To your salt maidenhead.
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Death's long anabasis.
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For intellect is a mansion where waste is without drain.
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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.
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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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Row after row with strict impunity The headstones yield their names to the element, The wind whirrs without recollection.
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My darling boy whom I shall never know, My son, I love you in my deepest fears.
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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.
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But in our age the appeal to authority is weak, and I am of my age.
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So face with calm that heritage And earn contempt before the age.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.
Allen Tate