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“... do justice to the paintings they praise are best passed over in silence, but there are exceptions. Wallace Stevens’s ‘Angel Surrounded by Paysans’, for instance. French painting had always been a touchstone for Stevens – Picasso is a repeated figure in the margins of his early poetry, Cézanne’s letters a key ...”

“... or portraiture or landscapes, still lifes pose such difficulty. I reassure myself by thinking of Wallace Stevens’s line: ‘It is not every day that the world arranges itself into a poem.’ In writing about art, Stevens recognised that the poet was anything but a passive observer. As a student, I was always taught ...”

“... everything vegetable sprouts thorns and runs with poison and aspires to the condition of creeper (Wallace Stevens’s ‘vine angering for life’). Home from home to invasive species, from carp to kudzu, from rain trees and Australian cockroaches to hundreds of thousands of Irma and Maria refugees from Puerto Rico. A world of allergens, dissolved like ...”

“... contemporary rival Tennyson, and the principal 20th-century poets, including even Yeats, Hardy and Wallace Stevens, let alone the various fashionable Modernists whose reputations are now rightly in rapid decline.’Such an estimate may do justice to the scale of Browning’s work. Whether it comes to terms with Browning’s actual identity as a poet is ...”

“... developed in several of the chapters.’ The defence sounds like an academic version of Wallace Stevens’s poetic project of arriving at insights through circularities rather than continuities of exploration, repeated affrays from various angles which precede the homing-in. McGann himself looks to Blake, whose ‘habit of returning to the same ...”

“... table at Newnham. On the same day he wrote with two plots for short stories, an account of reading Wallace Stevens aloud and an admission: ‘I neglected you. That’s one of my most tormenting thoughts that I didn’t suck and lick and nibble you all night long and it’s a thought I shall never let myself in for again once I’ve had the chance to mend ...”

“... and delicately differentiated footfalls, her pallor and colour’ laid side by side with Wallace Stevens’s ‘sensory and technical virtuosity ... the almost imperceptibly modern, silver-chiming resonance of “Peter Quince at the Clavier” ’. These aspects of the ‘new’ poetry ‘do much to ameliorate popular displeasure’. Certainly ...”

“... Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Sterling Brown, Gwendolyn Bennett, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Wallace Thurman and Rudolph Fisher. ‘The array of personalities in the literary area is startling,’ one of them wrote. ‘Few were born in New York, although we speak of the Harlem Renaissance. Claude McKay, one of the movement’s ornaments, was born in ...”

“... World War, alongside, in Europe, Four Quartets, Auden’s New Year Letter and H.D.’s Trilogy and Wallace Stevens’s Parts of a World in the States. Despite their desperate appeal to what he calls ‘the great incandescent power / of sublimation’ and renewal, Gascoyne never matched these poems of personal and spiritual crisis again. ‘The Post-War ...”

“... or possessed by him. Despite its debasing – indeed, in its very baseness – the orange, like Wallace Stevens’s plum, ‘survives its poems’. Stevens turns to oranges too, and in a surprisingly similar way: in ‘The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade’ the fruit is the pithy counterpoint to the regimented ...”

“... Caldecott to suck,/ For his doll’s calico corpse, red-needled in the book’. He discovered Wallace Stevens’s poetry and went to hear him when he gave a rare public reading at Harvard; Ashbery, sitting captivated in the front row, was surprised when Stevens ‘stood like a statue and wore an overcoat and scarf ...”

“... or anything’) is a dream of American writers in a tradition that runs from Cooper and Emerson to Wallace (‘you must become an ignorant man again’) Stevens and the Mailer of Why are we in Vietnam? James is telling his son what he tells us in Pragmatism: that ‘truth is made, just as health, wealth and strength are ...”