85 Quotes by Allen Tate

Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.

We who get plenty to eat and get itAdvertising the starvation of othersUnderstand everything not includingOurselves: We have enough to eat.[...]Everybody but us is an example of capitalism.

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.

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.

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

Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.

The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.

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.

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.