Allen Tate Quotes

Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.

I have never considered myself a poet. I have no interest in poetic artistry.

I'm inspired by the poets, so I'm always going to give in that direction, rather than in any other. It's the making of me... and also the downfall of me.

I'm the happiest combination you can think of. I'm a Russian poet, an English essayist, and a citizen of the United States.

Careers don't interest me. The only thing that interests me is continuing to be a poet on one level or another, whether acting or writing or directing.

During my twenties and thirties, my interest in the political poem increased as my apparent access to it declined. I sensed resistances around me. I was married; I lived in a suburb; I had small children.

Through fashion, it's possible to express deep values of one's creative talent and also the values that are expected of society.

He felt himself in suspension between the two worlds, the warm, neat civilization behind his back, the cool, dark mystery outside. We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.

Men are thinking, writing, and creating, because women were pouring their energy into those men; women are not creating culture because they are occupied with love.

A woman puts on a new dress eyeliner lip gloss to please others. A woman paints her toes to please herself. And if there was one thing I was familiar with it was pleasing...There's no way to finish that sentence without embarrassing myself.

Wit will shine Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.

Writing has always been my go-to form of expression. Whenever I was going through something as a kid, I would write it down and I would turn it into a poem.

The poems I did write there [in Harvard] include Alphabets the 1984 Phi Beta Kappa poem and A Sofa in the Forties. And, of course, the John Harvard poem for the 350th anniversary Villanelle for an Anniversary.

Man's unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between the desire to stand out and the need to blend in.

Every limited mind demands a certain freedom of expression, and the man who cannot express himself satisfactorily without the stimulation derived from the spirited mode of two centuries ago should certainly be permitted to follow without undue restraint a practice so harmless, so free from essential error, and so sanctioned by precedent, as that of employing in his poetical compositions the smooth and inoffensive allowable rhyme.

The social mould civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies.

This is the gift all writers seek-to write language that incandesces yet does not melt.

I have never thought of my life as divided between poetry and politics.

There's me in every character I put on the pages.

I always feel that there are two choices for women. Either be totally confident about your non-size-zero body and say, 'I love what I look like and this is who I am,' or be the person who is obsessed with diet and exercise and keeping toned. What feels more realistic to me is that some days I wake up and think I love how I look. On other days I say, 'If I had real self-control, I would be 10 pounds lighter.' That contradiction is, to me, what being a girl actually feels like.

To write at the same temperature at which I live I should write nothing but poetry.

If I thought that any poem of mine could have been written by anyone else, either a contemporary or a forerunner, I should suppress it with a blush; and I should do the same if I ever found I were imitating myself. Every poem should be new, unexpected, inimitable, and incapable of being parodied.

Part of our business is that you read interviews with these people and they don't really talk candidly about what's going on and the struggle - the struggle to do what you love and to maintain body image and to maintain this sort of false stature of who you're supposed to be as a role model and also who you are supposed to be to yourself personally and privately.