“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... make you expect me to progress in a straight line … The latest salutation, by the way, is from Wallace Stevens who sent the Partisan Review a letter … saying that my review of The Man with the Blue Guitar was the ‘most invigorating review’ that he had ever had.At other times, his arrogance wasn’t tempered by self-consciousness. He wrote to ...”

“... appear in Fish’s book and should be emended into disappearance, as should a nonexistent poem by Wallace Stevens twice called ‘Anecdote of a Jar’. At least, I hope that Fish wouldn’t claim that this mistitling has called the poem into existence, along the lines of his conclusion to ‘Interpreting “Interpreting the Variorum” ’: ‘I was once ...”

“... an instructor in the English department at Yale. Pearson was a correspondent of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens as well as F.O. Matthiessen, the Harvard scholar and cousin of his pupil, who had taken his own life earlier in 1950 under a cloud of threats over his leftist leanings and homosexuality. Pearson was in these years at work on a study of ...”

“... joined by government ministers and other top policemen, had him hounded out of office. When John Stevens, another luckless Deputy Chief Constable sent to Northern Ireland to investigate contacts between the security forces and terrorists, arrested Brian Nelson, a Protestant paramilitary, Nelson told him he had killed four Catholics because they were ...”

“... He was a friend of W.B. Yeats’s wife, George, and of Joyce’s wife, Nora; he corresponded with Wallace Stevens, who dedicated a poem to him. Richard Aldington called him ‘a paradox of a man if ever there was one. He looked like a priest in civvies.’ McGreevy chatted and gossiped a lot, knew a great deal about art and music and literature and was ...”

“... one is composing’ the work in question: a definition she borrows from Paul Valéry, who is, with Wallace Stevens, the tutelary deity of the book. The Odes of John Keats is itself certainly and thoroughly ‘composed’; it is thick with often beautiful clarities of perception organised into sometimes compelling coherences of theory; it all ...”

“... at all times its deal-table plainness and verve, no matter how recondite his preoccupations. Like Wallace Stevens, Jones believed that the greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world. He had briefly thought of becoming a monk after the war, before embracing a native this-worldiness which counterpointed the long views of his spirituality, just as ...”

“... Bidart/questions in art’. Three Poems has an aerated extravagance that brings to mind Wallace Stevens’s ‘Parfait Martinique: coffee mousse, rum on top, a little cream on top of that’ – though that sounds positively austere beside these cocktails. Sullivan’s balancing acts are more strenuous than those of ...”

“... For Jarrell, these poets were his contemporaries – Lowell, Moore, Bishop, Berryman and Stevens. When Jarrell writes that he is living in a time of great poetry, it is as if he is not merely describing but claiming something. Vendler’s belief in her contemporaries – that, as she has put it, ‘American poetry remains in good hands’ – is more ...”

“... do justice to the paintings they praise are best passed over in silence, but there are exceptions. Wallace Stevens’s ‘Angel Surrounded by Paysans’, for instance. French painting had always been a touchstone for Stevens – Picasso is a repeated figure in the margins of his early poetry, Cézanne’s letters a key ...”

“... or portraiture or landscapes, still lifes pose such difficulty. I reassure myself by thinking of Wallace Stevens’s line: ‘It is not every day that the world arranges itself into a poem.’ In writing about art, Stevens recognised that the poet was anything but a passive observer. As a student, I was always taught ...”

“... everything vegetable sprouts thorns and runs with poison and aspires to the condition of creeper (Wallace Stevens’s ‘vine angering for life’). Home from home to invasive species, from carp to kudzu, from rain trees and Australian cockroaches to hundreds of thousands of Irma and Maria refugees from Puerto Rico. A world of allergens, dissolved like ...”