Allen Tate Quotes - Page 2

The poet is he who fights on the passionate Side and whoever loses he wins; when he Is defeated it is hard to say who wins.

I had kept opaque Down deeper than the canyons undersea The sullen spectrum of a buried lake Nobody saw; not seen even by me.

Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.

Let us begin to understand the argument. There is a solution to everything: Science.

In an age of abstract experience, fornication Is self-expression, adjunct to Christian euphoria, And whores become delinquents; delinquents, patients; Patients, wards of society. Whores, by that rule, Are precious.

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

Peering, I heard the hooves come down the hill. The posse passed, twelve horse; the leader's face Was worn as limestone on an ancient sill.

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.

I say that what one loves is best: The midnight fastness of the heart.

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

Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.

Our loss put six feet under ground Is measured by the magnolia's root; Our gain's the intellectual sound Of death's feet round a weedy tomb.

Last night I fled until I came To streets where leaking casements dripped Stale lamplight from the corpse of flame; A nervous window bled.

Punctilious abyss, the yawn of space Come once a day to suffocate the sight.

Let us lie down once more by the breathing side Of Ocean, where our live forefathers sleep As if the Known Sea still were a month wide-- Atlantis howls but is no longer steep!

The idiot greens the meadow with his eyes, The meadow creeps implacable and still; A dog barks, the hammock swings, he lies. One two three the cows bulge on the hill.

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

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.

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.

we know our end A packet of worm-seed, a garden of spent tissues.

For intellect is a mansion where waste is without drain.

Venus knows country matters: country knows Venus: For Love, Dione's boy, was born on the farm.

All the sea-gods are dead. You, Venus, come home To your salt maidenhead.

Ah, Christ, I love you rings to the wild sky And I must think a little of the past: When I was ten I told a stinking lie That got a black boy whipped.

The dusk runs down the lane driven like hail; Far off a precise whistle is escheat To the dark; and then the towering weak and pale.