Quote

I say that what one loves is best: The midnight fastness of the heart.

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
Heart
Midnight
Loves
Best

More quotes by Allen Tate

Image
Venus knows country matters: country knows Venus: For Love, Dione's boy, was born on the farm.
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
The dusk runs down the lane driven like hail Far off a precise whistle is escheat To the dark and then the towering weak and pale.
Allen Tate
Image
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.
Allen Tate
Image
we know our end A packet of worm-seed, a garden of spent tissues.
Allen Tate
Image
The dreary flies, lazy and casual, Stick to the ceiling, buzz along the wall. O heart, the spider shuffles from the mould Weaving, between the pinks and grapes, his pall.
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
Struck in the wet mire Four thousand leagues from the ninth buried city I thought of Troy, what we had built her for.
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
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
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
For often at Church I've seen the stained high glass Pour out the Virgin and Saints, twist and untwist The mortal youth of Christ astride an ass.
Allen Tate
Image
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
Image
Men expect too much, do too little.
Allen Tate
Image
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.
Allen Tate
Image
In the cold morning the rested street stands up To greet the clerk who saunters down the world.
Allen Tate
Image
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.
Allen Tate
Image
So the dubbed conceit Played nursery of cheat To clear the I of sleet.
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