Allen Tate Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

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

“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.”

“I believe the term modulation denotes in music the uninterrupted shift from one key to another: I do not know the term for change of rhythm without change of measure.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.”

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