Allen Tate Quotes

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Allen Tate

Profession : Poet

Birth : November 19, 1899

Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.

Allen Tate

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

Allen Tate

The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.

Allen Tate

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

What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.

Allen Tate

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

Allen Tate

The Spring I seek is in a new face only.

Allen Tate

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

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.

Allen Tate

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

Allen Tate

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

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

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

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

Men expect too much, do too little.

Allen Tate

So the poet, who wants to be something that he cannot be, and is a failure in plain life, makes up fictitious versions of his predicament that are interesting even to other persons because nobody is a perfect automobile salesman.

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

We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.

Allen Tate

The mission for the day is to encourage students to think beyond traditional career opportunities, prepare for future careers and entrance into the workplace.

Allen Tate

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

Allen Tate