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“... deviation and cohesion in cummings has also been published in two other versions. Keyser on Wallace Stevens illustrates dangers Widdowson warns of. The final sub-section deals with ‘Style as Tension between Meaning and Form’, including Verma on topicalisation. Handler on understanding poetic speech acts (good sense here), and Heller on the ...”

“... for times when the batteries have run down’. The surprise is that instead of lecturing on Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Gertrude Stein and Marianne Moore, all of whom he acknowledges as ‘major influences’, he discusses an eclectic group of 19th and 20th-century poets who for the most part have endured ...”

“... into her ear ... ’ The fictiveness of the real is a favourite theme with Americans, from Wallace Stevens to Harold Robbins. They are afraid they live in a world they have made up, and made up badly, so that a soap opera, for example, may be seen not as an escape but as a secret verdict, a last metaphor for a bungled invention. Vidal knows this ...”

“... but, unlike hanging, it does not necessarily concentrate it. I not long ago read the letters of Wallace Stevens, that highly cerebral poet, who, in these letters, again and again cautions against reading too much. Stevens felt that too much reading left too little time for thinking. In part, no doubt, he had in mind ...”

“... He did not miss the parallel between his life and that of the American poet and insurance lawyer Wallace Stevens. But after all it is not very close: to Stevens the quotidian was a malady, not a stimulus, and his jargon as a poet did not have the same struggle with the constrictions of ordinary language. And ...”

“... A myth you act out, a fiction you believe in knowing it to be a fiction. Kermode liked to quote Wallace Stevens, the aphoristic Stevens of Opus Posthumous, and Rushdie’s Rai sounds rather like Stevens too – ‘our love of metaphor is pre-religious ... Religion came and ...”

“... The difference between ‘selected’ and ‘collected’ poems, Wallace Stevens wrote in a letter in 1954, is that ‘people read selected poems but don’t buy them’ and ‘buy collected poems but don’t read them’. The symbolism of a collected volume worried him: ‘A book that contains everything that one has done in a lifetime does not reassure one ...”

“... substantial bulk’; ‘the parsimonious connoisseur had discovered the necessity of eloquence’ (Stevens). All this is evidence of Hamilton’s fascination at the road not taken; here is someone (inaudibly, to most readers), crying: ‘Hold! Enough!’ Not only are Hamilton’s pursuits scrupulously separated off, and kept away from his own poetry (and his ...”

“... that remains for them afterwards is life working in an insurance company’ – when Glover meets Wallace Stevens in the hereafter, I should love to be a fly on the celestial wall. The book is not, and does not claim to be, a substantive contribution to the academic discussion of ethical principles, but it is a book that will offer a wide readership a ...”

“... 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 was still in demand for lectures and ...”

“... Libra, staring nowhere, ‘a look they’d been practising for years’. Like a long, late poem by Wallace Stevens, The Silence can seem like its own quiet battle with stillness, a thing of refrains and echoes.This should be no surprise. Leaving the old stability of reality begetting fiction, we have long since lived in a world where fiction begets ...”

“... intentions. 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 ...”

“... LRB (5 August). The idea for the poem came from a comment in an excellent book by Tony Sharpe on Wallace Stevens, in which he speculates on the flocks of pigeons mentioned in the last lines of ‘Sunday Morning’: And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on ...”

“... Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva make appearances. Rilke drops in, mocked by Karl Kraus. Dante and Wallace Stevens are silently cited. Obviously there is never a dull moment, though the sum total of those moments seems duller than they are. There is an old argument about texture and structure in poetry, and John Crowe Ransom thought that although you had ...”

“... in drawing coy attention to its nonsensicality. The watchword of such verse should be a line from Wallace Stevens: ‘Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.’ The strange relation is inevitable to poetry, and to its supreme fiction, but to pursue it consciously is to achieve tedium, as Joyce does in Finnegans Wake. ‘Any poet is a ...”