Allen Tate Quotes & Sayings

“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.”

“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.”

“The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!”

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

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

“Men expect too much, do too little.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”