“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.”
Other Allen Tate Quotes
Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.
Allen Tate 
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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.
Allen Tate
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What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.
Allen Tate
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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
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The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.
Allen Tate
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