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“... but rather those that do not seem to have been the most widely mentioned. The exclusion of Thomas Hart Benton is tantamount to leaving Steinbeck out of a survey of the modern American novel. The exclusion of Mark Tobey has to be the result of amnesia (or megalomania). The exclusion of Dorothea Tanning as of every other exponent of post-de Chirico Surrealism ...”

“... is: who reads these books and what purpose do they serve? I can imagine looking up a name in James Hart’s fifth edition of The Oxford Companion to American Literature. Updated to include ‘authors not yet born when this book was first begun’, it offers abbreviated commentaries on such newly arrived figures on the scene as Diane Wakoski (1937-; cited here ...”

“... were as full of mud and blood and horrors and blunders as the long Somme agony was. A review of Henry Williamson’s book on the Somme by some hysterical nitwit claimed that all the good and brave and the potential leaders were annihilated, and apparently on the first day! Frightful as it was, one must remember that it was followed by the large-scale ...”

“... bed in the Hotel des Artistes, New York. Lisa St Aubin de Teran prefaces her book with notes from Henry Grew Crosby’s curriculum vitae, lest we should lose track of biography in the bravura of Josephine’s recital: but it is the recital that makes the book, the well-fashioned clusters of clauses clinging round the reiterated appeal to ...”

“... provided the impetus, addressing meetings of mayors and industrialists to whip up enthusiasm while Henry Cole got on with the practicalities of presenting what the prince envisaged as a ‘living encyclopedia’ of international production. The resulting display in the Crystal Palace was a kind of Benthamite panopticon, a rational arrangement of all of human ...”

“... of self-pity, tempered by his characteristic half-belief in his own unrealistic fantasies: My hart was never broken till this day that I here the Queen goes away so farr off whom I have followed so many yeares with so great love and desire, in so many jurneys, and am now left behinde her and in a darke prison all alone … I that was wont to behold her ...”

“... stature who has been content to stop with Eliot and Pound? These were early loves, of course; and Henry James, a third expatriate, comes often into his thoughts. But what Baldick chiefly holds against Leavis – that he drops out all mediations except language in order to gain the sharpest picture of ‘the creative conditions’ – is peculiarly ...”

“... edition of his work, was a volume of lyrics, Permit Me Voyage, its title drawn from a line by Hart Crane with a tougher edge than the borrowing may indicate; an accomplished book, marred by an over-abundant proffered delicacy of sentiment – ‘the Chamber of Maiden-Thought’ shining sweetly but with too constant a glow. Agee soon found a regular job ...”

“... in Dublin in a given year. (In 1904, we find that 7 Eccles Street was vacant.) The critic Clive Hart, quoted here, writes that the Dublin of Ulysses was the one ‘remembered and coloured by [Joyce’s] own atypical personality’, but also ‘the Dublin … enshrined, embalmed in the pages of Thom’s – the official, statistical Dublin, the Dublin ...”

“... The James who stated that the modern equivalent of a Donatello statue is not something by Henry Moore but a drop-head Lamborghini was only exaggerating a dearly held truth: that the idea of Two Cultures is as silly a notion today as it would have been when Donatello and Brunelleschi were working in Florence. To the rationalism of the Movement, Clive ...”

“... it could have been a tram.9 March. I am reading Colm Tóibín’s New Ways to Kill Your Mother. Of Hart Crane’s suicide he writes: ‘He walked on deck … took off his coat, folded it neatly over the railing (not dropping it on deck) … then suddenly he vaulted over the railing and jumped into the sea.’ This was in 1932. At Calverley on the outskirts of ...”

“... singularity. So Hemingway ‘stems ultimately from the Emersonian reliance on the god within’. Hart Crane ‘keeps to his lifelong programme of so transuming his wealth of forerunners as to make them seem belated and himself their ever-early if sacrificial replacement’. Wallace Stevens, whom I have always read as a poet of light and of things emerging ...”

“... first issue of transition of 1927 included paintings by Ernst and poems by the American Modernist Hart Crane, the French Surrealists Robert Desnos and Philippe Soupault and the German Expressionist Georg Trakl (in translations from French and German by Eugene Jolas). A decade later, the last issue was still churning out Work in Progress, now alongside work by ...”

“... Shakespeare turns chronicle into history, then history into drama, and then – in the superb Henry IV plays – historical drama into something almost like myth: free-standing, undocumented and legendary works of art. Two hundred years before the novel emerged in Europe, and psychology became a dominant language of experience, Shakespeare brought about ...”

“... mesmerising: W.H. Auden believed that Eliot had had a mystical vision when he was a young child, Hart Crane was convinced that he was secretly gay, while Delmore Schwartz was a fount of scurrilous stories about Eliot’s sex life, which, according to Schwartz, included a relationship with the Jewish woman referred to as Rachel née Rabinovitch in ‘Sweeney ...”