Allen Tate Quotes
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We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.
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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!
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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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Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.
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Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet.
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I have felt darkness lead me by the hand Over the hill to greet the singing dawn.
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So the dubbed conceit Played nursery of cheat To clear the I of sleet.
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We are afraid that we have not lived. We are not afraid of dying.
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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.
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For intellect is a mansion where waste is without drain.
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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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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.
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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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Row after row with strict impunity The headstones yield their names to the element, The wind whirrs without recollection.
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Punctilious abyss, the yawn of space Come once a day to suffocate the sight.
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The day's at end and there's nowhere to go, Draw to the fire, even this fire is dying; Get up and once again politely lying Invite the ladies toward the mistletoe.
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The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.
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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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Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.
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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.
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The twilight is long fingers and black hair.
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Last night I fled until I came To streets where leaking casements dripped Stale lamplight from the corpse of flame; A nervous window bled.
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Peering, I heard the hooves come down the hill. The posse passed, twelve horse; the leader's face Was worn as limestone on an ancient sill.
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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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All the sea-gods are dead. You, Venus, come home To your salt maidenhead.
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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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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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Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.
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Struck in the wet mire Four thousand leagues from the ninth buried city I thought of Troy, what we had built her for.
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Therefore with idle hands and head I sit In late December before the fire's daze Punished by crimes of which I would be quit.
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