Allen Tate Quotes
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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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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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Punctilious abyss, the yawn of space Come once a day to suffocate the sight.
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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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So face with calm that heritage And earn contempt before the age.
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I say that what one loves is best: The midnight fastness of the heart.
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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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For often at Church I've seen the stained high glass Pour out the Virgin and Saints, twist and untwist The mortal youth of Christ astride an ass.
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The idiot greens the meadow with his eyes, The meadow creeps implacable and still; A dog barks, the hammock swings, he lies. One two three the cows bulge on the hill.
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I have felt darkness lead me by the hand Over the hill to greet the singing dawn...
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Last night I fled until I came To streets where leaking casements dripped Stale lamplight from the corpse of flame; A nervous window bled.
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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.
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We are afraid that we have not lived. We are not afraid of dying.
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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.
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Death's long anabasis.
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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.
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The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.
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The mission for the day is to encourage students to think beyond traditional career opportunities, prepare for future careers and entrance into the workplace.
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In the cold morning the rested street stands up To greet the clerk who saunters down the world.
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The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!
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Experience means conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama.
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Swimmer of noonday, lean for the perfect dive To the dead Mother's face, whose subtile down You had not seen take amber light alive.
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The torrent of the reaching shade Broke shadow into all its parts, What then had been of shadow made Found exigence in fits and starts...
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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.