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“... James Merrill​ has in Langdon Hammer the biographer he would have wished for: intelligent, appreciative, sympathetic, thorough, a first-rate reader of the poems, and an excellent writer to boot. Merrill would have hated to be the subject of a plodding biography. He was all about stylishness and elegance, in poetry and in life ...”

“... remembering forgetful yaks. Reviewing Notes from the Air (2007), a selection from the later poems, Langdon Hammer suggested that ‘Ashbery’s writing, whatever else it is about, is usually about other writing.’ This is a common claim, and it sounds smart, but one could just as easily say that Ashbery’s writing is usually about perceptual states, or ...”

“... for the helpless or voiceless or overlooked has elicited from critics such as Stephen Burt and Langdon Hammer and James Longenbach favourable comparisons with the predatory, will-to-power poetics of Lowell, or the rampant self-aggrandising confessionalism of Berryman and Plath. Assessments of Jarrell as a poet inevitably play him off against his ...”

“... In so far as there was a shared response to Hart Crane’s poetry after his suicide in 1932, it took the form of invidious comparisons. ‘Crane had the sensibility typical of Baudelaire,’ R.P. Blackmur wrote in 1935, ‘and so misunderstood himself that he attempted to write The Bridge as if he had the sensibility typical of Whitman.’ Dylan Thomas’s poems, Randall Jarrell wrote in 1940, ‘often mean much less than Crane’s – but when you consider Crane’s meanings this is not altogether a disadvantage ...”