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 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
Dramatic experience is not logical it may be subdued to the kind of coherence that we indicate when we speak, in criticism, of form. – 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
Just as the Security Council was largely irrelevant to the great struggle of the last half of the twentieth century – freedom against Communism – so too it is largely on the sidelines in our contemporary struggles against international terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. – John Bolton