Allen Tate Quotes

Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.

And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.

The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.

Like a monument, a great cartoon can render a complex idea in a single thrilling and grand summation. Unlike a monument, it is also able to illustrate processes and systems – cause and effect, unintended consequences and the like.

Poetry and art nourish the soul of the world with the flavor-filled substances of beauty, wisdom and truth.

Where philosophy ends, poetry must commence. There should not be a common point of view, a natural manner of thinking which standsin contrast to art and liberal education, or mere living; that is, one should not conceive of a realm of crudeness beyond the boundaries of education. Every conscious link of an organism should not perceive its limits without a feeling for its unity in relation to the whole. For example, philosophy should not only be contrasted to non-philosophy, but also to poetry.

Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.

Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time.

Modernistic-Abstractionist-Art consists of 75% explanation and 25% God knows what!

I feel that the surrealists have created a series of valid external landscapes which have their direct correspondences within our own minds.

[Literature is] a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.

I guess the role of art is to make something that is ambiguous and complex.

Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flair, in a deliberate prism of words.

You know nothing till you know all; which is the reason we never know any thing.

I sometimes set myself thinking and imagining that I find amongst men but one single art or science, and that is drawing or painting, all others being members proceeding therefrom.

The human mind is so complex and things are so tangled up with each other that, to explain a blade of straw, one would have to take to pieces an entire universe. A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble.

People forget that art is not just a piece of entertainment. It is the place where we collectively declare our values and then act on them. That's one of the most powerful things we have as a community: our culture and our art. And it's the intersection between life and how people deal with life. It's the most important thing we do.

A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry.

Literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic.

Poetry is a fossil rock-print of a fin and a wing, with an illegible oath between.

Thus poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially impressive partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech, and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances of excitement.

If an art has for its function to represent manners and people, I do not see how it can avoid systematizing its sensibility to the extent of showing some figures much as Molière, for instance, did, as absurd or detestable.

Art is an effort to create, beside the real world, a more humane world.