Life & Wisdom Quote by Allen Tate

Tate frames his own vocation as a kind of elaborate consolation prize, and the phrasing is barbed enough to hurt on purpose. “According to its doctors” is the tell: he ventsriloquizes a clinical verdict to mock both himself and the modern impulse to pathologize inconvenient longing. The “one intransigent desire” is pointedly archaic and political - not just to be a soldier, but a Confederate general, the most charged, defeated form of American martial glamour. Tate isn’t confessing nostalgia so much as staging the drama of a man born too late for the role he mythologizes.

The sentence pivots on a double refusal: “could not or would not.” History blocks him, but so does temperament. That ambiguity is the engine of the passage. It suggests that the fantasy of command is also a fantasy of moral simplicity: a world where ambition can be worn as a uniform and justified as duty. Modern society, in his account, has “no use for” those ambitions; it can treat them only as symptoms. So he “set up for poet,” a phrase that makes poetry sound like a storefront hustle, then “beg[s]” - humiliatingly - to invent “fictions” about drives that can’t be admitted directly.

Context matters: Tate, a Southern Agrarian and a modernist with reactionary impulses, is writing out of a culture trying to launder defeat into identity. The subtext is that art becomes a replacement battleground, a way to salvage hierarchy, honor, and personal magnitude when the public world has moved on - and a way to indict that new world for making certain kinds of wanting feel illegitimate.