"Men expect too much, do too little."
"In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem."
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Source: allen tate (1953). “the man of letters in the modern world”
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"Narcissism and the Confederate dead cannot be connected logically, or even historically; even were the connection an historical fact, they would not stand connected as art, for no one experiences raw history."
"According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for."
"The dusk runs down the lane driven like hail; Far off a precise whistle is escheat To the dark; and then the towering weak and pale."
"Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker."
"Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation."