Life & Wisdom Quote by Allen Tate

A critic who goes hunting for motives, diaries, and historical trivia, Allen Tate suggests, is dodging the one thing that can actually answer back: the poem itself. The line is a manifesto in miniature for the New Criticism world Tate helped shape, a mid-century pushback against the genteel habit of treating poems as coded biographies or moral pamphlets. “Real evidence” is courtroom language, pointedly severe: criticism isn’t a social visit with the author, it’s an argument that has to be proven. And the proof, Tate insists, must be public and available to anyone willing to read closely.

The subtext is disciplinary. Tate is trying to professionalize taste, to move literary judgment away from personal charm, political alignment, or the critic’s own sentimental hunches. By saying the evidence is what lies “before his gaze,” he frames reading as an act of attention, almost an ethical stance: you don’t get to substitute what you know about the poet for what the poem does. It’s also a quiet flex of modernist confidence. If the poem is “finished,” it’s autonomous, engineered, a made object rather than a leak from a psyche.

There’s irony in how hard that boundary line has been to keep. Tate’s era wanted the poem sealed; our era keeps reopening it to power, identity, and circumstance. The quote endures because it names a baseline rule of fair play: whatever else you bring to a poem, you still have to reckon with the words on the page.