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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Experience means conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama. Allen Tate Read Quote
How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry. Allen Tate Read Quote
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. Allen Tate Read Quote
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 Read Quote
