Life & Wisdom Quote by Allen Tate

Tate’s line is a coolly aggressive piece of mid-century literary politics: a poem is not a diary entry, not a “message,” not a mood board the reader can swipe into personal meaning. It “knows” itself. That strange personification is the point. By making the poem the only reliable intelligence in the room, Tate sidelines both the author’s intention and the reader’s appetites. Whatever you think you know about what a poem “means,” you only know it through the poem’s own verbal machinery.

The intent sits squarely in the New Criticism moment Tate helped define, when close reading was a method and also a moral stance. Against biographical hunting (“what was the poet really feeling?”) and against paraphrase (“so the poem is saying X”), Tate argues for the poem as an autonomous object: meaning isn’t a payload hidden behind the lines, it’s an effect generated by diction, rhythm, image, syntax, and contradiction. “In a manner of speaking” is a sly disclaimer that doubles as a dare: he’s aware the claim is metaphorical, yet he wants you to treat it as operational truth while reading.

The subtext is disciplinary. Poetry, for Tate, resists being reduced to opinion, sermon, or sociology; it demands a kind of attention that can’t be outsourced to context. That’s also why the sentence is so taut and circular: “knowing” loops back into “words,” refusing escape hatches. In an era anxious about mass culture and simplified “communication,” Tate builds a small fortress around the poem and calls that fortress knowledge.