Life & Wisdom Quote by Allen Tate

Calling poets "practical" is a deliberate provocation, the kind Allen Tate liked: it flips the common insult that poetry is decorative, optional, or safely useless. Tate, a poet-critic who came up with the Southern Agrarians and later helped define midcentury literary seriousness, is pushing back against the sentimental idea of the poet as a dreamy amateur. He wants poetry to sound like craft, not vapor.

The word "results" does the real work. Tate isn’t talking about measurable outcomes in the policy-and-profit sense; he’s talking about effects: what a poem does to a reader’s attention, conscience, and felt sense of reality. In Tate’s worldview, language isn’t a transparent window, it’s the tool that shapes what you can see. So the poet is "practical" because he’s manipulating the most practical instrument we have: perception. The subtext is almost combative: if you think poetry is indulgence, you’re misunderstanding how culture actually gets made.

There’s also a critique of modernity tucked in here. Tate worried that industrial, bureaucratic life trained people to value only the quantifiable, leaving experience thin and fragmented. Poetry, for him, is not an escape from that world but a corrective technology - a disciplined making that restores complexity and consequence to words. He’s insisting that art’s accountability isn’t to utility, but to precision: the result is a changed mind, not a changed spreadsheet.