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Punctilious abyss, the yawn of space Come once a day to suffocate the sight.
Allen Tate -
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....
Allen Tate
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Let us begin to understand the argument. There is a solution to everything: Science.
Allen Tate -
There is a calm for you where men and women Unroll the chill precision of moving feet.
Allen Tate -
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.
Allen Tate -
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 -
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 -
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 have felt darkness lead me by the hand Over the hill to greet the singing dawn...
Allen Tate -
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.
Allen Tate -
I say that what one loves is best: The midnight fastness of the heart.
Allen Tate -
All the sea-gods are dead. You, Venus, come home To your salt maidenhead...
Allen Tate -
The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.
Allen Tate -
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.
Allen Tate
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Death's long anabasis.
Allen Tate -
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...
Allen Tate -
Last night I fled until I came To streets where leaking casements dripped Stale lamplight from the corpse of flame; A nervous window bled.
Allen Tate -
We are afraid that we have not lived. We are not afraid of dying.
Allen Tate -
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.
Allen Tate -
Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker.
Allen Tate