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“... as surrealist. The patrons of Max Ernst and Buñuel, the de Noailles, commissioned a terrace from Robert Mallet-Stevens with rectangular windows in the surrounding wall framing ‘scenes’ in the landscape. These look the Picturesque round the last bend to its illogical conclusion. The natural landscape was now a series of ...”

“... morning, lying there with a broken neck.Millay rose to fame while still in her twenties. She beat Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens for the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Although she became a proselytiser in her last decade, devoted to progressive causes to which she fitted her verses (‘not poems, posters,’ she admitted), she ...”

“... Well, I could never write a verse, ­– could you?Let’s to the Prado and make the most of time.Robert Browning, ‘How It Strikes a Contemporary’The world has an established place for poems about paintings – sometimes you wonder if there was ever a poet who didn’t write one – but, oddly, the poem-painting relationship doesn’t seem to be reversible ...”

“... New York’s Guggenheim Museum contains in an annex a covert Robert Mapplethorpe gallery, a sober exhibition space which, like the masterpieces of its namesake, seems consecrated to the unusual and the mortifying. The current show – Joel-Peter Witkin’s photographs of corpses, amputees and hermaphrodites – holds a grotesqueness sufficient to remind the visitor of how sweet, how antique already, the infamous Mapplethorpe images have become ...”

“... like the word “dissociate”’, the vice president, Hubert Humphrey, and the defence secretary, Robert McNamara, confirmed that ‘the prime minister’s position was well understood’ and ‘there would be no hard feelings.’ As the war in Vietnam progressed, however, opposition among the public and inside the Labour Party increased, and by late 1967 ...”

“... without any expectation of getting beyond the effect. Most, though by no means all, of Wallace Stevens’s poetry works on this principle. In Wordsworth the language of much of the Prelude is very different from that of a narrative poem like ‘Resolution and Independence’. Criticism of poetry in American universities, dominated as it is by the writings ...”

“... around us. Nobody is more sensitive than Ashbery to such accidents. Ashbery has followed Wallace Stevens in centring the poems on the flow of his thought, the Niagara-like rush and hum of his brain. But being less vain and more worldly than Stevens, he has mostly avoided narcissism – unless one imagines a Narcissus whose ...”

“... assistant curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art when Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg were making Action Painting famous; and he and John Ashbery, his friend and contemporary, must have felt their poetry belonged in tandem with that school. O’Hara’s ‘Why I am not a painter’ doesn’t tell us why he is not a painter, but ...”

“... process by avoiding paraphrasable meaning altogether. One need only point to the work of Wallace Stevens or John Ashbery to show how successfully some of it sustains our expectations while ultimately refusing to deliver the semantic goods. Having extracted a poem’s point, runs the usual defence of such teasing evasions, readers will have no further use for ...”

“... began with, or endured through, the appalling This Side of Paradise to the triumph of Gatsby. Stevens, Cummings, Pound, Crane, Dos Passos: their merits and possibilities of development were noted at an early stage in their careers. For two decades or a little more, Wilson was almost infallibly discerning about recent American writers, about their British ...”

“... eras have been fond of rare words, as the recent examples of Mallarmé, T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens will suggest.) Finally, it does no justice whatever to the richness of this particular text to think, for example, of the transcendent meteorological and zoological panorama of the Voice from the Whirlwind as a ‘compendium list’. We shall never know ...”

“... Partisan Review, the Kenyon Review and Sewanee Review, with a good deal of auto-canonising. Robert Lowell, almost by default it seemed, was ceded pride of place, the ‘most important American poet now at work’. Lowell and Randall Jarrell, roommates at Kenyon College in the 1930s, and to a lesser extent Berryman too, were big on rating and ...”

“... in Hollywood in 1972. Fifteen famous directors are there, including John Ford, Rouben Mamoulian, Robert Mulligan, George Stevens, Robert Wise, William Wyler, Billy Wilder. Hitchcock sits next to Buñuel, says very little, then at one point puts an arm round his companion’s shoulder and ...”

“... woman Makes the rest look down. Wallace Stevens I’ve never much liked Tsvetaeva. A churlish way to begin: I do so simply because I think that, in not liking her very much, I am at one not only with much of her posterity but with almost all her contemporaries. On the way to hazarding some unpopular ...”

“... Poetry pro that I hardly am, I feel that, and I guess Ian Hamilton does too. His biography of Robert Lowell came out in 1982 (at the time, I was half-seriously trying to write a PhD on him). Hamilton, as he writes in ‘A Biographer’s Misgivings’, the first piece in Walking Possession, knew his subject fairly well: ‘I had seen quite a lot of Lowell ...”