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Allen Tate poems, quotations and biography on Allen Tate poet page. Read all poems of Allen Tate and infos about Allen Tate.
John Orley Allen Tate was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1943 to 1944.
Life
Tate was born near Winchester, Kentucky to John Orley Tate, a businessman, and Eleanor Parke Custis Varnell. In 1916 and 1917 Tate studied the violin at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music.
He began attending Vanderbilt University in 1918, where he met fellow poet Robert Penn Warren . Warren and Tate were invited to join a group of young Southern poets under the leadership of John Crowe Ransom; the group were known as the Fugitive Poets and later as the Southern Agrarians. Tate contributed to the ... more »
Allen Tate Poems
Row after row with strict impunity
The headstones yield their names to the element,
The wind whirrs without recollection;
In the riven troughs the splayed leaves... more »
Where we went in the boat was a long bay
a slingshot wide, walled in by towering stone--
Peaked margin of antiquity's delay,
And we went there out of time's monotone:... more »
Last night I fled until I came
To streets where leaking casements dripped
Stale lamplight from the corpse of flame;
A nervous window bled.... more »
Dark accurate plunger down the successive knell
Of arch on arch, where ogives burst a red
Reverberance of hail upon the dead... more »
I
Towards nightfall when the wind
Tries the eaves and casements
(A winter wind of the mind... more »
I rise, gentlemen, it is the pleasant hour.
Darkness falls. The night falls.... more »
There are wolves in the next room waiting
With heads bent low, thrust out, breathing
At nothing in the dark; between them and me... more »
Allen Tate Quotations
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''I suck in smoke! I smile at grimy mirth,
Allen Tate (1899-1979), U.S. poet, critic. "Fair Cuirass Shattered."
And laugh to think that you had parried death.'' -
''every son-of-a-bitch is Christ, at least Rousseau....''
Allen Tate (1899-1979), U.S. poet, critic. "Retroduction to American History." -
''For intellect is a mansion where waste is without drain....''
Allen Tate (1899-1979), U.S. poet, critic. "Retroduction to American History." -
''The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!''
Allen Tate (1899-1979), U.S. poet, critic. "Idiot." -
''The twilight is long fingers and black hair.''
Allen Tate (1899-1979), U.S. poet, critic. "Long Fingers."
Ode To The Confederate Dead
Row after row with strict impunity
The headstones yield their names to the element,
The wind whirrs without recollection;
In the riven troughs the splayed leaves
Pile up, of nature the casual sacrament
To the seasonal eternity of death;
Then driven by the fierce scrutiny
Of heaven to their election in the vast breath,
They sough the rumour of mortality.
Autumn is desolation in the plot
Of a thousand acres where these memories grow
From the inexhaustible bodies that are not
Dead, but feed the grass row after rich row.
Think of the autumns that have ...
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