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.
Category Archive: Allen Tate
Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.
The mission for the day is to encourage students to think beyond traditional career opportunities, prepare for future careers and entrance into the workplace.
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 Spring I seek is in a new face only.
Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.
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.
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.
What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.
Dramatic experience is not logical; it may be subdued to the kind of coherence that we indicate when we speak, in criticism, of form.