Art & Creativity Quote by Allen Tate

Tate opens by pretending to grant the doctrine its clean, aloof dignity: art for art's sake is fine, he shrugs, if we actually mean it. That conditional is the knife. He’s not rescuing aestheticism so much as staging a trap for it, separating a serious claim about artistic autonomy from the genteel brand-name version that, in his view, turned into a fashionable manner and then a hollow alibi.

The jab at "the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago" is doing a lot of cultural work. Tate is writing as a high-modernist Southerner with a critic’s impatience for inherited poses. By pointing to an English scene (think late Aestheticism and its afterglow), he suggests that "art for art’s sake" had been reduced to a recognizable product: precious, self-regarding, rhetorically perfumed. Not a philosophy, a style. The distance of "forty years ago" also matters: he’s calling it dated without having to litigate names. It’s a way of dismissing an entire mood as yesterday’s cosmopolitan chic.

Subtext: Tate wants seriousness back in the room, but not the blunt sermonizing modernists were also accused of. He’s arguing that artistic purity isn’t the problem; bad faith is. If a poem claims to exist only for beauty, it had better earn that claim through form, pressure, and intelligence, not through decorative evasions. The line reads like a quip, but it’s really a demand: stop using slogans to protect mediocre work, and stop confusing a historical fad with a defensible artistic principle.