Quotes from Allen Tate

The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!

Men expect too much, do too little, Put the contraption before the accomplishment, Lack skill of the interior mind To fashion dignity with shapes of air. Luxury, yes but not elegance!

There is a calm for you where men and women Unroll the chill precision of moving feet.

Men cannot live forever But they must die forever.

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

In the cold morning the rested street stands up To greet the clerk who saunters down the world.

Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Men expect too much, do too little.

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.

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.

Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.

Dramatic experience is not logical it may be subdued to the kind of coherence that we indicate when we speak, in criticism, of form.

Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker.

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.

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.

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.

Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.

Good manners, Madam, are had these days not For your asking, nor mine, nor what-we-used-to-be's. The day is a loud grenade that bursts a smile Of serious weeds in a comic lily plot.

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.