Life & Wisdom Quote by Allen Tate

A poem, for Tate, isn’t a diary entry preserved in amber; it’s an object that has to stand up after the author’s pulse has left the room. His question lands like a rebuke to the romantic reflex to treat art as a breadcrumb trail back to a poet’s feelings. “Not where it came from or why” swats away origin stories and motivational lore in favor of a harsher, craft-centered standard: once the poem exists, it has obligations independent of its maker.

That stance makes sense in Tate’s context. As a major figure among the Southern Agrarians and a contributor to the New Critical climate that dominated mid-century American literary culture, he lived in a moment when criticism was trying to professionalize itself by limiting what “counts” as evidence. The poem becomes a self-contained machine: tension, image, irony, form. The critic’s task is not to psychoanalyze the author or chase historical causality, but to read what’s on the page with disciplined attention. Tate’s phrasing is austere for a reason; it performs the very restraint he’s demanding.

The subtext is also defensive. Asking “what is the poem” insists on permanence in an era increasingly tempted by journalism, confession, and topicality. Tate is arguing that a poem’s value is measured not by sincerity or biography, but by what it becomes: a structure of meaning that can survive being cut loose from the circumstances that produced it.