Experience means conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama.
Category Archive: Allen Tate
Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.
But in our age the appeal to authority is weak, and I am of my age.
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.
We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.
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.