All Allen Tate Quotes
Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.
Allen Tate
58% of people like this quote
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
53% of people like this quote
What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.
Allen Tate
53% of people like this quote
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
53% of people like this quote
The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.
Allen Tate
51% of people like this quote
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
51% of people like this quote
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
50% of people like this quote
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
50% of people like this quote
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
50% of people like this quote
Experience means conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama.
Allen Tate
49% of people like this quote
We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.
Allen Tate
48% of people like this quote
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
47% of people like this quote
Related authors