Allen Tate Quotes

37 quotes in 550 categories

• Men expect too much, do too little.
• Experience means conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama.
• 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…
• Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.
• 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…
• 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…
• The mission for the day is to encourage students to think beyond traditional career opportunities, prepare for future careers and entrance into the workplace.
• But in our age the appeal to authority is weak, and I am of my age.
• The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.
• 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…
• Among friends one has the privilege of saying nothing; the civility consists in the assumption that one's silence will be civilly understood. I can imagine…
• For some reason most critics have a hard time fixing their minds directly under their noses, and before they see the object that is there…
• Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.
• Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.
• 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…
• 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…

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