Art & Creativity Quote by Allen Tate

Tate opens with a schoolroom certainty about harmony and then swerves into bafflement, and that little turn is the point: he’s dramatizing how the language of art always runs out right when the most interesting experience begins. “Modulation” is a clean, agreed-upon label for motion-within-order, a sanctioned kind of departure that still assumes a governing system (keys, relationships, return). Then he reaches for an equivalent term for rhythm - not a new “measure,” not a new box, but a change that happens inside the same formal container - and finds nothing. The gap reads like a critique of critical vocabulary itself: we can name transformations that theory has dignified, but we stumble over shifts that feel bodily, temporal, hard to diagram.

As a poet, Tate is also smuggling in a larger anxiety about form. In verse, “measure” carries a double charge: it’s both the technical unit (meter) and the moral fantasy of control (to measure, to regulate). A change of rhythm without a change of measure is what great lines do when they refuse to behave while still “obeying” the rules on paper. Tate’s “I do not know” is less confession than pressure tactic, forcing the reader to notice how criticism can over-privilege the visible architecture (scheme, stanza, meter) and under-describe the lived pulse.

Contextually, this fits a modernist and New Critical sensibility: reverence for form paired with suspicion that the most decisive effects are produced in the micro-variations - the syncopations - that our terminology can’t quite catch.