Allen Tate Quotes

A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.

The reader's challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions.

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little.

Lyrics need to be good, but they don't need to be obvious right away.

Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

The commonest error made in relation to poetry is that it consists simply in verse-making. Many confound the casket of meter and rhyme with the jewel of thought which it encloses, and, perhaps, in some instances, after close investigation, they have found the casket empty and turned away with feelings of disappointment and disgust.

Poetry is something I love to do. Good poetry has an amazing ability to be communicative before it's even understood. I get emotional just from the beauty of words.

I see 'Hansel and Gretel' as a breakthrough book for me, and one of the reasons is because I started to apply meaning to the hidden details.

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it's just obtuse to them. It's hard to relate to.

People are so used to reading novels now, they just read a poem straight through to get the meaning. And that's something totally different from the slow way you read something if it's a tune; which to me a poem has to be.

I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.

I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

I couldn't believe verse was supposed to be hard. It was a snap for me. I loved Shakespeare.

In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There's too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all.

With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.

With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits.

People who read poetry, for example, like the feel, the heft and the smell of a book.

I dislike Allegory - the conscious and intentional allegory - yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language.