Time & Perspective Quote by Allen Tate

Tate’s line is a clean little ambush: it skewers the critic’s most flattering habit, the instinct to look past the work in front of them and hunt for an origin story that feels more “serious” than the object itself. The image does the work. “Directly under their noses” suggests not just proximity but embarrassment, as if the poem is almost insulting in its obviousness. Then comes the telescope, a tool meant for distance, repurposed into a comic symbol of misapplied intelligence. Critics, he implies, aren’t lacking vision; they’re addicted to the wrong kind of seeing.

The intent is partly defensive, partly disciplinary. As a poet associated with the New Critics’ orbit, Tate is pushing back against biographical and historical reductionism: the temptation to treat art as evidence of what caused it rather than an experience with its own internal pressures. “Where it came from” is the tell. Origins are comforting because they promise explanation without the risk of judgment. If you can place a poem on a horizon line of influences, traumas, movements, you can avoid the awkward, intimate task of grappling with how it actually works: its tone, its structure, its contradictions, its sensuous particulars.

The subtext is also social. Critics gain status by demonstrating range, by name-checking lineages, by narrating contexts. Tate calls that a kind of professional vanity, a prestige economy of distance. The barb lands because it’s not anti-intellectual; it’s anti-evasion. Look first, he’s saying, and only then trace the horizon.