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“... 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 point of ...”

“... novelistic. In time-honoured fashion, Banville takes it from a canonical poem, nodding to Wallace Stevens (‘Things as they are/Are changed upon the blue guitar’). He dutifully sprinkles his text with other tags from Stevens: ‘things as they are’; ‘the thing itself’; ‘pale Ramon’. But though neat in some ...”

“... Our relatives were more likely to be an embarrassment, not a recommendation. The query with which Mark Boxer, usually lying on the floor, was later to unnerve insecure talents seeking work from the Sunday Times – ‘Tell me who you know’ – was meaningless to us in the Fifties. We had to manage with a landlady and barman as references. No wonder those of ...”

“... that case where the hell was I? but what instead did I want it to sound like? Schwartz made his mark just before the Second World War when Modernism was at its most popular, and it was in this tradition that Allen Tate saw his first book, In dreams begin responsibilities, when it came out in 1938, hailing it as ‘beyond any doubt the first real innovation ...”

“... in their proper locales: ‘It was while walking home with a student one evening that [Wallace] Stevens ... spoke of his recent poem, “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction”. “I said that I thought we’d reached a point at which we could no longer really believe in anything unless we recognised it was a fiction.” Exactly. The ‘place’ was ...”

“... in architecture, but country houses manage to secure a much wider, even popular, audience. Mark Girouard’s Life in the English Country House has actually become a best-seller – extraordinary in the field of architectural history – and its unprecedented success has encouraged Yale to issue as a companion volume a new edition of his earlier The ...”

“... to undergraduates, taking his first job at Amherst College in 1917. Pound, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane all lived by other means; though it’s worth pointing out that the poetry and criticism of Eliot in particular, and to a lesser extent of Pound, played a significant role in shaping the curriculum and ...”

“... The reference to ‘one idea’ recalls the passage in ‘Esthétique du Mal’ where Wallace Stevens dismisses                                      the lunatic of one idea         In a world of ideas, who would have all the people Live, work, suffer and die in that idea In a world of ideas. The cure ...”

“... the difference in style was striking. Set beside the early work of Pound and Eliot (or of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, for that matter), Frost’s ‘simple’ lyrics might have seemed to be some sort of throwback – as if they belonged far down the back slope of the great Modernist watershed. But those same unassuming poems earned Pound’s ...”

“... offered, but in this book there is much further evidence that the heritage of Emerson, Whitman and Stevens is being given a new ...”

“... be both in and out of the game, as Whitman put it – to have a private as well as a public self. Mark Twain went to great lengths to impose himself on the crowd, and he was a more successful performer than Messrs Vidal and Mailer, but he was also able to hold a self in reserve. For Hemingway it was all much more difficult. His private life was extraordinary ...”

“... to her and she wrote back. Then I left Deutsch to join Queen Magazine. They wanted me because of Mark Boxer, the Art Director, who had become a great friend. There was a sort of troika: Jocelyn Stevens, who’d bought it, Mark Boxer and Beatrix Miller, who was brought in as the ...”

“... exhibition opens with works from the 1950s, including Hemlock (named after a line from a Wallace Stevens poem) and Evenings on 73rd Street, both a mass of densely worked strokes against a nimbus of white paint, like scrawled writing on a piece of paper. John Ashbery described the way her ‘calligraphy, sometimes flowing, sometimes congealing, continues ...”

“... needed for tanks and sold it on the French black market. Whiting’s italics and exclamation-mark seem amply justified when he reports that from February to May 1945 there were on the Western Front ‘five hundred cases of convicted rape a month!’ But matters got worse after the ‘unconditional’ victory. The huge heists of jewels and bullion ...”

“... sons; other tall, graceful buildings contain e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams.Eliot cast the longest shadow on the mid-century generation, not simply because of the brilliance of the poetry and essays: he was both the model and the anti-model for the New Criticism (espoused by Lowell and Jarrell’s ...”