Quotes by Allen Tate

Allen Tate

American poet and essayist

Alive from: 1899-1979

Category: Poets (Contemporary)

Quotes 1 till 15 of 24.

• Allen Tate

  

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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.

• Allen Tate

  

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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.

• Allen Tate

  

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  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 As often as one gets the rare chance - In killing there is more than commentary.

• Allen Tate

  

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

• Allen Tate

  

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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.

• Allen Tate

  

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

• Allen Tate

  

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  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 they use a telescope upon the horizon to see where it came from.

• Allen Tate

  

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

• Allen Tate

  

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  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.

• Allen Tate

  

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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.

• Allen Tate

  

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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.

• Allen Tate

  

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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.

• Allen Tate

  

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  Men expect too much, do too little.

• Allen Tate

  

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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.

• Allen Tate

  

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