Art & Creativity Quote by Allen Tate

Tate opens with a question that sounds innocent, then loads it with a quiet threat: if you ask where a poem “comes from” the way a lab asks where a symptom comes from, you’ve already decided what a poem is. The phrase “happen to write” needles the modern hunger for origin stories - talent as a fluke, inspiration as a traceable event - and then he frames the interrogators as “psychologists” and “geneticists,” figures of a rising 20th-century confidence that human mysteries can be diagrammed, diagnosed, and ultimately domesticated.

The sly move is in “geneticists of poetry.” It’s a jab at the idea that art has a DNA code waiting to be sequenced: childhood trauma, libido, the right neural quirk. Tate, a New Critic adjacent to the era’s push for close reading and formal integrity, is defending the poem’s autonomy against reductionism. Not because biography and psyche are irrelevant, but because turning a poem into evidence makes it easier to explain than to encounter. Explanation becomes a kind of theft: the work’s strangeness is traded for a tidy cause.

Subtextually, Tate is also poking at status. Science is the prestige language of modernity; calling these people the “geneticists” of poetry makes them sound authoritative and faintly absurd, as if they’re wearing lab coats to a lyric. His intent isn’t to deny that poems have origins, but to insist that the more interesting question is what the poem does once it exists - the pressure it exerts, the form it invents, the experience it refuses to be simplified into a case file.