“... life on the space station, for instance, are as serenely packed with philosophical suggestion as a Wallace Stevens poem: ‘the heart scraped hollow with craving, which is not emptiness in the least, more the knowledge of how fillable he is. The sights from orbit do this; they make a billowing kite of you, given shape and loftiness by all that you ...”

“... out to clever students in a practical criticism seminar, might well be identified as being by Wallace Stevens. Thick sleep, with error of the tangled wood, and vapour from the evening marsh of sense, and smoothness of the glide of Lethe, would inaugurate his dullard innocence, cool’d of his calenture, elaborate brute. That last line, in ...”

“... the following year, garnered respectful reviews; she shone at public readings; she bantered with Wallace Stevens and Vladimir Nabokov at parties; when she continued her studies at Oxford, she was funded by a blessed ‘St Gugg’ fellowship. While in England she made influential friends such as Donald Hall and the Plath-Hugheses, and published in the ...”

“... from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 121 to Emerson’s ‘Experience’ and on into several poems by Stevens. The rhetoric of manhood is inherent in the very traditions of literary production and inspiration and isn’t simply one of literature’s themes. It finds its voice in that magnification by which certain male writers come to believe in their own ...”

“... books, and of others who have been clergymen. T.S. Eliot was a publisher, and as everyone knows Wallace Stevens and Franz Kafka worked for large insurance organisations. To my knowledge, only two writers of importance have been managers of a paint factory: you in Turin, Italy and Sherwood Anderson in Elyria, Ohio. Anderson had to flee the paint factory ...”

“... underwater story) – until the gleaming flow of particles is finally set down, is stilled If Wallace Stevens had been writing this, he would have evened up the material inside each parenthesis into a pentameter, and would have written the phrases in apposition: Algae signalling the entry point . . . In unison, without advancing, Waiting for some ...”

“... You have to go case by case. Sometimes most striking is the disjunction between them, as with Wallace Stevens – though it’s useful to remember that a major poet can be an insurance executive as easily as anything else. A biographer can minimise the problem by focusing on the facts of the life and leaving readers to make connections to the ...”

“... European underpinnings. His intelligence was at once sceptical and abstractly poetic, closer to Wallace Stevens (‘Poetry is not personal’) than to Walt Whitman, with whom he has so often been paired (sometimes by himself). ‘I guess I’m deeply in love with America, really,’ Evans said later in his life. And then, by way of ...”

“... is traditionally a poetic virtue. (‘The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,’ as Wallace Stevens wrote.) But a poetry that emulated pluralistic federal-republican values, whatever other benefits it might gain, could not feel that it has order on its side, exactly. ‘A poem which was really like a political democracy ...”

“... imagine. It was followed by another lonely-coffee-cup lyric, but in a quite different key – Wallace Stevens’s poem ‘The Dwarf’:Neither as mask nor as garment but as a being,Torn from insipid summer, for the mirror of cold,Sitting beside your lamp, there citron to nibbleAnd coffee dribble … Frost is in the stubble.Then came Edmund Wilson’s ...”

“... poems, hung around in one’s mind ‘long after one has put the book down in favour of Wallace Stevens’. And then there was her interest in pets: ‘She has also written a book about cats, which as far as I am concerned casts a shadow over even the most illustrious name.’ Although the unillustrious poet privately acknowledged her debt to ...”

“... no respecters of borders. In his famous meditative poem ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’, Wallace Stevens calls to mind The spirit’s speeches, the indefinite, Confused illuminations and sonorities, So much ourselves, we cannot tell apart The idea and the bearer-being of the idea.He means here, with Heaney, that sound and sense are enmeshed, and ...”

“... uninteresting and irritating’. Williams’s poetry, which often reads like low-wattage Wallace Stevens (‘What would man be without/his inner legend, private myth?’), was similarly unsuccessful, and after many years spent teaching a poetry course shaped by Winters’s personal canon, Williams lost track of whose thoughts were whose and put ...”

“... more agricultural) and you are somewhat executive, so much the better,’ he wrote to Wallace Stevens teasingly in 1935. ‘It is so we are saved from being literary … Our poetry comes choppy, in well-separated poems, well interrupted by time, sleep and events.’ As a boy, he told his friend Bernard De Voto, he had been entirely ...”

“... on him of the American ‘greats’ in 1959, Schuyler said that William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens inspired greater freedom than the others. The freedom of Schuyler’s red isn’t quite the concretion of Williams’s red wheelbarrow, or the dream of Stevens’s drunken sailor catching tigers in red ...”