Allen Tate Quotes

It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience).

The subject of the poem usually dictates the rhythm or the rhyme and its form. Sometimes, when you finish the poem and you think the poem is finished, the poem says, "You're not finished with me yet," and you have to go back and revise, and you may have another poem altogether. It has its own life to live.

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

I was writing notes, but not composing poems. The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process.

I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.

The poem builds in my mind and sits there, as if in a register, until the poem, or a piece of a longer poem, is finished enough to write down. I can hold several lines in my head for quite some time, but as soon as they are written down, the register clears, as it were, and I have to work with what is on the paper.

There's something about the shape that a poem takes in my mind before I write it that has to do with suddenness.

There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve.

The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.

I don't think anybody is a poet 24/7, only in those rare moments when a person is producing a poem.

Lyrical poets have to be in touch with visceral experience. I've always tried to avoid virtual experiences. That's emerging in my fiction.

All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.

Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.

The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.

My father read poetry to me, encouraged me to memorize poems. But the writing of it was quite a different thing.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I'll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, 'I'd like to write about that.' Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

So the best way to understand poetry, which is made by men, is to imitate, and that goes back to making work as a kind of doorway into new work, as opposed to making work as a mirror of the old work.

Sometimes, for me, lyrics are derived from poems that I'm working on, and they kind of cross back and forth between the two.

Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water.