Allen Tate Quotes
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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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But we shall not know the world by looking at it; we know it by looking at the hovering fly.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.
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So the dubbed conceit Played nursery of cheat To clear the I of sleet....
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Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.
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All the sea-gods are dead. You, Venus, come home To your salt maidenhead...
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What was I saying? An Egyptian king Once touched long fingers, which are not anything.
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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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I say that what one loves is best: The midnight fastness of the heart.
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I thought I heard the dark pounding its head On a rock, crying: Who are the dead?
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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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Let us begin to understand the argument. There is a solution to everything: Science.
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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...
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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....
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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.