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“... printed at the end. These show him at work, in reviews at least, on Lowell, Auden, Plath, Heaney, Ashbery and many more. He made his name as a specialist on Swift, where his monumental biography, completed in 1983, has told us more than any previous source about the man, his works and the age, to draw on a subtitle Victorian in its confident amplitude. His ...”

“... was almost invisible as rows and piles of books crept across its surface: American poetry from Ashbery to Zukofsky, literary biographies, journals waiting to be read and piles of photocopied poems for Practical Criticism classes.There was a large board on the wall just inside the door for cuttings and postcards (mostly of Marilyn Monroe, sent by students ...”

“... that such a tag would seem appropriate to describe any other poet of the 20th century. Why her? John Ashbery’s praise for Bishop as a ‘writer’s writer’s writer’, whose work ‘inspires in writers of every sort’ an ‘extraordinarily intense loyalty’, seems apt. And Ashbery knew that to say such a thing ...”

“... an express elevator. It is a cultivated essence of shop-window shrines and Pentecostal chapels (John Wesley with tambourines, lugubrious and off-pitch). Its own particular harsh pure green is raised and reinforced until it becomes an architecture. It is to green what a snowball is to white, an impactment. Although Brainard was raised a Methodist, these ...”

“... realism’, it seems a plausible clue to the relationship of Kafka to Flaubert, or of Kurosawa to John Ford, but will be found a clueless guide to Proust and his relationship to a single precursor. We are advised by Anderson to think hard about Jameson’s suggestion that we may ‘grow new organs to expand our sensoria and our bodies to some new, as yet ...”

“... recalls that of a previous winner of the Kentucky Derby: ‘Even as his poetic father is Stevens, Ashbery’s largest ancestor is Whitman, and it is the Whitmanian strain in Stevens that found Ashbery.’Almost everything that is strange about this version of the American canon can be traced back to Bloom’s Emersonian ...”

“... caught any of Alan Bennett’s Westminster Abbey footage? Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring himself to deliver much more than formulaic world-weariness, a drone like a miraculously articulate David Hockney impersonator. Jonathan Meades does this schtick so much better, performs himself with lip-smacking ...”

“... though for me it spoils the ‘line’ of the poem – was reinstated at the petitioning of John Berryman in For the Union Dead (1964); a revised version of that is printed as a separate poem called ‘Ovid and Caesar’s Daughter’ in History (1973); and now Bidart and Gewanter have unearthed a seven-stanza monster that was printed in the Kenyon ...”