Life & Wisdom Quote by Allen Tate

Tate opens by refusing the easy sport of swaggering anti-Freudianism. The first move is defensive, almost courtroom-precise: "I am not ridiculing..". He knows the audience he’s courting includes modern readers intoxicated by the new explanatory machines of the early 20th century - psychoanalysis, linguistics, the dreamwork - and he won’t win them by sneering. So he grants their claims a seat at the table while quietly limiting their jurisdiction.

The key word is "origins". Tate isn’t arguing that verbal patterns, dreams, and repressions are irrelevant; he’s arguing they’re insufficient as a total account. That’s the New Critic’s instinct: the poem is not a symptom report or a lab result. He nods at mechanism, then pivots toward mystery without announcing it. "Verbal mechanisms" suggests craft and technique, the gears of rhetoric. "Dreams" and "repressions" nod to the subterranean self. By listing them side by side, Tate flattens the hierarchy that would make psychology the master key. Each is merely one ingredient among "more besides" - a phrase that implies a whole ecology of causes: history, belief, tradition, moral pressure, the stubbornness of form.

The subtext is a warning against reductionism dressed up as sophistication. Tate’s tone is calm, but the stance is polemical: if you treat poetry as an "origin story" you can explain away, you’ll miss what poetry does in public and in language. He’s protecting the poem’s autonomy while conceding that art is made by messy minds, not angels.