Allen Tate Quotes

Men expect too much, do too little.

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.

Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker.

Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.

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.

The mission for the day is to encourage students to think beyond traditional career opportunities, prepare for future careers and entrance into the workplace.

I have felt darkness lead me by the hand Over the hill to greet the singing dawn.

In the cold morning the rested street stands up To greet the clerk who saunters down the world.

So face with calm that heritage And earn contempt before the age.

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.

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.

Experience means conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama.

The twilight is long fingers and black hair.

Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.

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.

The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!

But in our age the appeal to authority is weak, and I am of my age.

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.

The Spring I seek is in a new face only.

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.

Venus knows country matters: country knows Venus: For Love, Dione's boy, was born on the farm.

Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.

Dramatic experience is not logical; it may be subdued to the kind of coherence that we indicate when we speak, in criticism, of form.

Row after row with strict impunity The headstones yield their names to the element, The wind whirrs without recollection.

But we shall not know the world by looking at it; we know it by looking at the hovering fly.

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.

The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.

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!

Antiquity breached mortality with myths. Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates A cornice on the Third National Bank.

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.

We are afraid that we have not lived. We are not afraid of dying.

There's precious little to say between day and dark, Perhaps a few words on the implacable will Of time sailing like a magic barque Or something as fine for the amenities.

Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.

My darling boy whom I shall never know, My son, I love you in my deepest fears.

We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.

For intellect is a mansion where waste is without drain.

we know our end A packet of worm-seed, a garden of spent tissues.

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.

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.

Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.

There is a calm for you where men and women Unroll the chill precision of moving feet.

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.

I had kept opaque Down deeper than the canyons undersea The sullen spectrum of a buried lake Nobody saw; not seen even by me.

Let us begin to understand the argument. There is a solution to everything: Science.

Ah, Christ, I love you rings to the wild sky And I must think a little of the past: When I was ten I told a stinking lie That got a black boy whipped.

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.

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!

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.

Struck in the wet mire Four thousand leagues from the ninth buried city I thought of Troy, what we had built her for.

I thought I heard the dark pounding its head On a rock, crying: Who are the dead?