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“... spirit on all sides and proclaim it in letters of fire to shine like a lone crocus in a dusty field. Ah, the man who walks secure, a friend to others and himself, indifferent that high summer prints his shadow on a peeling wall! Don’t ask us for the phrase that can open worlds, just a few gnarled syllables, dry like a branch. This, today, is all ...”

“... personal feelings. I have published for more than 40 years my gratitude for Hill’s art and for Lowell’s, and for 30 years my gratitude for Hecht’s,’ it is difficult not to feel that the repetitions override the disclaimers, and not to wonder what gratitude is when there is so much of it, and when it has been so insistently published. But Ricks ...”

“... sums up the activities of his colleagues and epigones: There is endless work to be done in the field of electronic music. And many people at work: David Behrman, Gordon Mumma, Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier, Phill Niblock, to name five. And in the field of video and visual technology (composers also have eyes): ...”

“... with a fair amount of stress on the ‘I must’. The greatest difficulty for the poet is how to go on being one. Randall Jarrell set it out like this at the end of his essay on Stevens: ‘A man who is a good poet at 40 may turn out to be a good poet at 60; but he is more likely to have stopped writing poems, to be doing exercises in his own manner, or to ...”

“... profited from his achievement would include Allen Ginsberg and Louis Zukofsky (both Jewish), the Lowell of Notebook, the Orientally-minded Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder on whom Cathay made such an impact, British poets as different from each other as Donald Davie and Jeremy Prynne, Objectivists like Oppen and Reznikoff, and of course the whole group of ...”

“... work, documenting the stars through photographs taken from his private observatory, must go on. And so substantial funding and a telescope find their way to the Harvard College Observatory, whose director, Pickering, had naturally been at the dinner party. Thus a chip falls one way instead of another. That this story then becomes one of women ...”

“... but the war made its way into the nervous system of her poems indirectly and mysteriously. Robert Lowell was a high-profile conscientious objector, writing to Roosevelt in September 1943 with a ‘Declaration of Personal Responsibility’ which objected to the mining of the Ruhr Dams and the bombing of Hamburg. He concluded: In 1941 we undertook a patriotic ...”

“... is demanding and faultless. Novelists tend to be amateurs of information, believing a little to go a long way; Buchan is a pro. Nor is this just another way of saying that he was for ten years a foreign correspondent of the FT; his authority (like Joseph Roth’s, say) is altogether deeper, more committed, more structural, than that of journalism. He ...”

“... Xanadu. A great deal of the pleasure it offers derives from the openness – rare in the academic field, where positions tend to be held with entrenched fervour – that the author permits in telling of his unique journey. Having said this, I have to declare that it is this very scrupulousness which makes Felstiner’s achievement at best a minor or ...”

“... would be mingling with the dust of the place, would not be washed by the seeping rains into the field. The wind by now had taken his ashes, dropped them and scattered them and lifted them up again and carried each mote a different way around the curve of the world. The clearing was burned free of all that had ever oppressed him. No cross was there to say ...”

“... in the door. It has become a byword with us, your first words, remember? ‘How far would ye go for fifty bob?’ We’ve had times. I miss your guitar: I hope I didn’t damage it irrevocably. Sadie Until we get the official biography, which is being written by Fintan O’Toole, we have little chance of making sense of Heaney’s occasional ...”

“... to both poets’ work, with its jump-cuts, densely layered quality and deliberately grainy field of vision, all contributing to a sense of instability, movement, pressure – something approaching synaptic assault, a feeling that may seem familiar to anyone who has spent time in Midtown or Lower Manhattan during working hours. This effect is amplified ...”

“... of the actor James Earl Jones shoo-flying Kevin Costner back to Woodstock with insect repellent in Field of Dreams. But had you been in Pittsburgh, an aspiring writer on the high-school newspaper, the reality of the Sixties began with Harper’s. South Hills Village Shopping Mall, air-conditioned and marqueed with capital letters because in 1968 it was the ...”

“... is, as MacCaig sees him, a cock:            in the amazing uniform of a wildly foreign Field Marshal, scans two worlds through his monoculars. – No enemy in sight ... The Field Marshal becomes a Pioneer Corps private in drag and half-heartedly scratches the scratches on the homely ground. Both these are from ...”

“... As a boy, Robert Duncan had a recurring dream. He would imagine himself in the middle of a treeless field. The ripe grass rippled, though there was no wind, and the light, as he later remembered, ‘was everywhere’, though there was no sun to be seen. Seeing himself in the centre of a circle of children, all of them singing and playing ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’, Duncan understood that he was ‘it’: ‘the Chosen One … a “King” or victim of the children’s round dance ...”