Allen Tate Quotations

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

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....

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

For intellect is a mansion where waste is without drain....

Antiquity breached mortality with myths. Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates A cornice on the Third National Bank.

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!

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.

Row after row with strict impunity The headstones yield their names to the element, The wind whirrs without recollection....

I have felt darkness lead me by the hand Over the hill to greet the singing dawn....

I thought I heard the dark pounding its head On a rock, crying: Who are the dead?