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.
~Allen Tate

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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.
~Allen Tate

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At twelve I was determined to shoot only For honor; at twenty not to shoot at all; I know at thirty-three that one must shoot As often as one gets the rare chance - In killing there is more than commentary.
~Allen Tate

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

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

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Experience means conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama.
~Allen Tate

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Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.
~Allen Tate

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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.
~Allen Tate

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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.
~Allen Tate

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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.
~Allen Tate

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Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.
~Allen Tate

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Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.
~Allen Tate

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Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.
~Allen Tate

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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.
~Allen Tate

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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.
~Allen Tate

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

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The Spring I seek is in a new face only.
~Allen Tate

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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.
~Allen Tate

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We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.
~Allen Tate

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What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.
~Allen Tate

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