Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker. – Allen Tate
I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it. – Allen Tate
How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry. – Allen Tate
There is probably nothing wrong with art for arts sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago. – Allen Tate
I believe there is a relationship between having an interest in the arts and the behaviour of society as a whole. Some politicians find it difficult that the arts is a weapon of happiness… Politics is often about deprivation rather than the opening up of ideas and nourishing creative endeavour. – Richard Eyre