Allen Tate Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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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We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.
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So the dubbed conceit Played nursery of cheat To clear the I of sleet....
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POET If not in a place, where are the People weeping? LIBERAL They creep weeping in the face, not place. POET Is it something with which we may cope The weeping, the creeping, the peepee-ing, the peeping?
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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.
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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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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.
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What was I saying? An Egyptian king Once touched long fingers, which are not anything.
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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...
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Let us begin to understand the argument. There is a solution to everything: Science.
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Antiquity breached mortality with myths. Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates A cornice on the Third National Bank.
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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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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 a small gathering of friends who say nothing all evening: they recoil from saying anything that the others don't want to hear; and their silence would be the subtlest courtesy.
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We know our end A packet of worm-seed, a garden of spent tissues.
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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.
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All the sea-gods are dead. You, Venus, come home To your salt maidenhead...
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Venus knows country matters: country knows Venus: For Love, Dione's boy, was born on the farm.
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Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.
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Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.
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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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I say that what one loves is best: The midnight fastness of the heart.
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Punctilious abyss, the yawn of space Come once a day to suffocate the sight.