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“... of an earlier generation, Duncan finds in the work of his modernist ‘elders’ – H.D., Pound, William CarlosWilliams, D.H. Lawrence, even T.S. Eliot, whom he considered ‘too cautious to be great’ – support for the Romantic proposition that literature was ‘a text of the soul in its search for fulfilment in ...”

“... is for professional posers and the in-house magazine-stand offers antique cigarettes and copies of William Burroughs’s Ghosts of Chance. Upstairs, there are quilted blackboard panels behind each bed and the colour television is hidden inside a thin cupboard with a cut-out Osiris eye. Light is hosed from a surgical tube and is so feeble that it’s almost ...”

“... favourite English-language book). On the walls were photographs of Oscar Wilde, drawings by William Blake and examples of Walt Whitman’s early writings. Émigré writers and French intellectuals flocked there, and to the larger shop on rue de l’Odéon, where it moved in 1922. ‘From that moment on,’ Beach said, ‘for over twenty years, they ...”

“... of younger English poets who had heard rumours of Black Mountain College, read their Pound and William CarlosWilliams, cannibalised Donald Allen’s influential anthology, The New American Poetry (1960), but never experienced a prime specimen of this fascinating otherness. Where Dorn was exceptional, as Prynne ...”

“... as someone who, though odd, could ‘write wonderfully about the external, everyday world’; and William CarlosWilliams, busy writing Paterson, is admired for his practice of going to the park on Sundays where he ‘watched what people did and made it part of the poem’. It is the great pleasure of encountering ...”

“... is, in a way that returns poetry to the professors even more fundamentally than was envisaged by William CarlosWilliams when he complained that The Waste Land ‘gave the poem back to the academics’. Despite some scoring against the ‘academic’ character of poets like John Ashbery (whose work is described as the ...”

“... one of those who care a great deal for the writers of Eastern Europe, and the experiments of William CarlosWilliams and the Beats. I’d first met him when I was a student myself, in the Eighties, when travelling across America by car seemed like the right sort of thing to be doing. There was a gang of us ...”

“... like his poems, had a wilful, manufactured look. (He had, in fact, changed it by deed poll from William Guinneach Gunn to Thompson William Gunn – Thompson was his mother’s maiden name.) It was clear, too, that he enjoyed his own style, his wit, his urge to dismiss what was dull and cautious, to celebrate what was ...”

“... later, having published An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology in 1932, A Novelette and Other Prose by William CarlosWilliams, and two books by Pound: How to Read and The Spirit of Romance. It was while the Oppens were in Europe that the word ‘Objectivist’ came into existence. Pound had foisted Zukofsky on Harriet ...”

“... about a ‘return to Hardy’, and twenty years later Davie himself was asserting that the work of Carlos Williams had ‘nothing to do with an inquiry into English poetry’, thus endorsing the popular – and, as I think, mistaken – view that there could be an American poetry which had severed ‘all ties with English poetry’. Davie was early ...”

“... tall, graceful buildings contain e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and William CarlosWilliams.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 ...”

“... be said to be such a thing as a pure Americanness in poetry. Earlier ‘Redskin’ poets such as William CarlosWilliams sought to achieve it, probably, in contradistinction from the European corruptions of men like Eliot. But I find it much more strongly represented in such a post-Eliot poet as John Ashbery, who ...”

“... a book.’ It is worth noting​ how unerring Berlin’s taste was. She spoke of both Chekhov and William CarlosWilliams as models. Her characters read Middlemarch the way other people read Flowers in the Attic: dangling from one hand. The editor of A Manual for Cleaning Women, Stephen Emerson, describes exchanging ...”

“... poets and seekers. Heavily dosed on Gertrude Stein, and fired up by a chance encounter with William CarlosWilliams, Welch was confirmed in his destiny as an outsider, a casual labourer, cab driver, fisherman, backwoods hermit. He had his task, as writer and recorder, but, unlike Snyder, he never found his ...”

“... source. My bias, which I will attempt to overcome, tends towards the more cynical view ascribed to William Burroughs by Jack Kerouac. ‘When you start separating the people from their rivers what have you got? Bureaucracy!’ Having triumphantly ghosted London’s autobiography, Ackroyd’s obvious follow-up was the Thames: generator of life, origin of the ...”