Allen Tate

“Experience means conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Men expect too much, do too little.”

“But in our age the appeal to authority is weak, and I am of my age.”

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

“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.”