Success Quote by Allen Tate

Tate lands the jab like a Southern gentleman flicking ash: the poet is a loser at “plain life” who compensates by manufacturing better, sharper versions of his own inadequacy. It’s funny because it’s mean, and it’s mean because Tate wants poetry to be more than self-pity dressed up as art. The line sets up an almost slapstick contrast between the grandiose (“wants to be something that he cannot be”) and the aggressively ordinary (“automobile salesman”). By ending on that particular figure, Tate punctures the romance of the poet-as-seer and replaces it with a salesman’s daily grind - not because salesmen are contemptible, but because the world is.

The subtext is a defense of poetic making that refuses sentimental excuses. Yes, poetry begins in failure, envy, or mismatch between ambition and capacity. That’s not an indictment; it’s the fuel. Tate’s point is that art’s alchemy works when private defeat becomes public interest: the poet’s “fictitious versions” are compelling because they translate a personal predicament into a structure other people can recognize without having lived it.

“Nobody is a perfect automobile salesman” is the sly universalizer. Even the most pragmatic life is a performance riddled with insecurity, rejection, and improvisation. Tate writes from a moment (mid-century modernism and the Southern Agrarians orbiting it) suspicious of therapeutic self-expression and hungry for craft, discipline, and form. He’s arguing that poetry earns its place not by being confessional, but by turning the cracked materials of ego into something cleaner than ego: an object other people can use.