American - Poet | November 19, 1899 - February 9, 1979
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
HistoryArtStandConnectionDead
Men expect too much, do too little.
MenToo MuchLittleExpectMuchToo
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.
WordsKnowingAnythingOwnPoetNor
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.
ChangeMusicBelieveKeyMeasure
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.
DreamsGreatI AmPoetryThreeMore
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.
PoetryWriteQuestionHappenWhere
Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.
GeneticBeenGatherDetachment
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.
TimeHorizonMindsHardReasonSee
Experience means conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama.
ExperienceConflictDramaBeingOur
But in our age the appeal to authority is weak, and I am of my age.
AgeI AmAuthorityWeakOurAm
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.
ChanceHonorKnowMoreRareShoot
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.
SocietyDesirePersonalBecomePoet
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