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“... details stud the narrative, the setting is like something out of South American fiction or Wallace Stevens – rich, exotic, decorated, dandyish. A book is admired for ‘the hand stitching of the spine, the wonderful filleting of the gathered leaves, the green morocco cover, embossed with tiny silver stars’. For all the novel’s modish ...”

“... career. The only possible response to critics of his work was to ‘beat the shit’ out of them. Wallace Stevens, twenty years older than him and slightly crocked, made some disparaging remarks: Hemingway slugged him. The $25,000 African safari produced its own disappointments: amoebic dysentry, and a kudu with 57-inch horns taken by a friend, compared ...”

“... Tomlinson refuses to put the clock back to pretend that after Pound and Eliot, Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens have written in English, the English poetic tradition remains unaffected ... he appears to believe, as Pound and Eliot did before him, that a Valéry and a Mallarmé change the landscape of poetry in languages other than their own. No wonder ...”

“... repugnant – artfulness of any kind seems. ‘In the presence of the violent reality of war,’ Wallace Stevens wrote, ‘consciousness takes the place of the imagination. And consciousness of an immense war is a consciousness of fact.’ It’s some such argument that lies behind the 1939-45 revulsion against Modernism, or indeed any kind of artistic ...”

“... for years half-avoiding and half-resisting the opulence and extensiveness of poets as different as Wallace Stevens and Rainer Maria Rilke; crediting insufficiently the crystalline inwardness of Emily Dickinson, all those forked lightnings and fissures of association; and missing the visionary strangeness of Eliot. And these more or less costive attitudes ...”

“... bank and subsequently his job as a publisher; William Carlos Williams had his medical practice; Wallace Stevens had his insurance office; Philip Larkin had his obligations as a university librarian. Auden had prose. Lots of it: several of his New Yorker reviews weigh in at well over eight thousand words, though he economised on effort, and maximised ...”

“... self-evidently, but also those seemingly austere figures Whitman, Brecht, Murray and Brodsky. As Wallace Stevens said, ‘It must give pleasure.’) It looks random, but like Thom Gunn’s blue jay scuffling in the bushes, it ‘follows some hidden purpose’. Other things, set beside it, look lame and tedious – like prose. It reminds me of another ...”

“... verb, no explanation – it is the first line of ‘Dutch Graves in Bucks County’, a poem that Wallace Stevens published in 1943. The image may have come from a march-of-time documentary of Americans training to fight in the Second World War. Probably the machines included tanks and a lorry convoy, possibly a squadron of fighter planes. What became of ...”

“... a great many of these anthologies. There is no T.S. Eliot to be found in them. No Ezra Pound. No Wallace Stevens. Everything floats down to a gentle paradox, and here is ours: anthologists who sell emotional progress to their readers hate poetry that constitutes progress in itself. It’s tough news. I know it’s tough. Let me protect you. Like the ...”

“... up weaker and older men. I had heard of without really believing in the fight he had with the poet Wallace Stevens at a drunken party in Key West. It does seem to have happened, when the novelist was about forty and the poet about sixty and as usual overweight. Hemingway despised Stevens for asking him to hush the ...”

“... reminded that his first book The Unmediated Vision (1954) was contemporary with the late poetry of Wallace Stevens and with such critical works as Erich Heller’s The Disinherited Mind: his alertness to critical fashions never removes him from a romantic tradition lamenting the disenchantment of the external world, and seeking restoration for this in the ...”

“... to Eastman by punching him out – as he would other male authors, including the mild-mannered Wallace Stevens, who had called him a ‘sap’, though not to his face. He would save his revenge on Stein for the printed page and a much later date, in the deftly poisonous account of a lesbian tiff between her and Toklas in A Moveable Feast. His parents ...”

“... a friend of Adolph Gottlieb and of Milton Avery: there were poetry readings (the work of Eliot and Wallace Stevens was in favour). And so on through the Thirties – he joined a group (The Ten), exhibited, wrote (about children’s art, for instance). In 1938 he became a naturalised American. In 1939 his work appeared in an exhibition, The Ten: Whitney ...”

“... is a book full of echoes of other writers, Balzac, Blake, Sade, Baudelaire, Goethe, Mervyn Peake, Wallace Stevens and a host of forgotten describers of circuses, of Russia and of dear old smoky London, and for a while it seems lost in the throng. ‘Lor’ love you, sir,’ it opens in stage Cockney, introducing us to Fevvers, the famous winged lady ...”

“... it is not animism, or pathetic fallacy, but a magical instability. Roth writes as well as anyone (Wallace Stevens, say) about attractiveness: anyone who has read Weights and Measures will remember the effect on Lieutenant Eibenschütz of the tinkle of the gypsy Euphemia’s earrings; from the name Lutetia (in Confession of a Murderer) ‘there emanated a ...”