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“... books, and of others who have been clergymen. T.S. Eliot was a publisher, and as everyone knows Wallace Stevens and Franz Kafka worked for large insurance organisations. To my knowledge, only two writers of importance have been managers of a paint factory: you in Turin, Italy and Sherwood Anderson in Elyria, Ohio. Anderson had to flee the paint factory ...”

“... underwater story) – until the gleaming flow of particles is finally set down, is stilled If Wallace Stevens had been writing this, he would have evened up the material inside each parenthesis into a pentameter, and would have written the phrases in apposition: Algae signalling the entry point . . . In unison, without advancing, Waiting for some ...”

“... You have to go case by case. Sometimes most striking is the disjunction between them, as with Wallace Stevens – though it’s useful to remember that a major poet can be an insurance executive as easily as anything else. A biographer can minimise the problem by focusing on the facts of the life and leaving readers to make connections to the ...”

“... European underpinnings. His intelligence was at once sceptical and abstractly poetic, closer to Wallace Stevens (‘Poetry is not personal’) than to Walt Whitman, with whom he has so often been paired (sometimes by himself). ‘I guess I’m deeply in love with America, really,’ Evans said later in his life. And then, by way of ...”

“... poems, hung around in one’s mind ‘long after one has put the book down in favour of Wallace Stevens’. And then there was her interest in pets: ‘She has also written a book about cats, which as far as I am concerned casts a shadow over even the most illustrious name.’ Although the unillustrious poet privately acknowledged her debt to ...”

“... no respecters of borders. In his famous meditative poem ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’, Wallace Stevens calls to mind The spirit’s speeches, the indefinite, Confused illuminations and sonorities, So much ourselves, we cannot tell apart The idea and the bearer-being of the idea.He means here, with Heaney, that sound and sense are enmeshed, and ...”

“... uninteresting and irritating’. Williams’s poetry, which often reads like low-wattage Wallace Stevens (‘What would man be without/his inner legend, private myth?’), was similarly unsuccessful, and after many years spent teaching a poetry course shaped by Winters’s personal canon, Williams lost track of whose thoughts were whose and put ...”

“... make you expect me to progress in a straight line … The latest salutation, by the way, is from Wallace Stevens who sent the Partisan Review a letter … saying that my review of The Man with the Blue Guitar was the ‘most invigorating review’ that he had ever had.At other times, his arrogance wasn’t tempered by self-consciousness. He wrote to ...”

“... appear in Fish’s book and should be emended into disappearance, as should a nonexistent poem by Wallace Stevens twice called ‘Anecdote of a Jar’. At least, I hope that Fish wouldn’t claim that this mistitling has called the poem into existence, along the lines of his conclusion to ‘Interpreting “Interpreting the Variorum” ’: ‘I was once ...”

“... joined by government ministers and other top policemen, had him hounded out of office. When John Stevens, another luckless Deputy Chief Constable sent to Northern Ireland to investigate contacts between the security forces and terrorists, arrested Brian Nelson, a Protestant paramilitary, Nelson told him he had killed four Catholics because they were ...”

“... one is composing’ the work in question: a definition she borrows from Paul Valéry, who is, with Wallace Stevens, the tutelary deity of the book. The Odes of John Keats is itself certainly and thoroughly ‘composed’; it is thick with often beautiful clarities of perception organised into sometimes compelling coherences of theory; it all ...”

“... at all times its deal-table plainness and verve, no matter how recondite his preoccupations. Like Wallace Stevens, Jones believed that the greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world. He had briefly thought of becoming a monk after the war, before embracing a native this-worldiness which counterpointed the long views of his spirituality, just as ...”

“... He was a friend of W.B. Yeats’s wife, George, and of Joyce’s wife, Nora; he corresponded with Wallace Stevens, who dedicated a poem to him. Richard Aldington called him ‘a paradox of a man if ever there was one. He looked like a priest in civvies.’ McGreevy chatted and gossiped a lot, knew a great deal about art and music and literature and was ...”

“... Bidart/questions in art’. Three Poems has an aerated extravagance that brings to mind Wallace Stevens’s ‘Parfait Martinique: coffee mousse, rum on top, a little cream on top of that’ – though that sounds positively austere beside these cocktails. Sullivan’s balancing acts are more strenuous than those of ...”

“... For Jarrell, these poets were his contemporaries – Lowell, Moore, Bishop, Berryman and Stevens. When Jarrell writes that he is living in a time of great poetry, it is as if he is not merely describing but claiming something. Vendler’s belief in her contemporaries – that, as she has put it, ‘American poetry remains in good hands’ – is more ...”