“... or possessed by him. Despite its debasing – indeed, in its very baseness – the orange, like Wallace Stevens’s plum, ‘survives its poems’. Stevens turns to oranges too, and in a surprisingly similar way: in ‘The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade’ the fruit is the pithy counterpoint to the regimented ...”

“... Caldecott to suck,/ For his doll’s calico corpse, red-needled in the book’. He discovered Wallace Stevens’s poetry and went to hear him when he gave a rare public reading at Harvard; Ashbery, sitting captivated in the front row, was surprised when Stevens ‘stood like a statue and wore an overcoat and scarf ...”

“... or anything’) is a dream of American writers in a tradition that runs from Cooper and Emerson to Wallace (‘you must become an ignorant man again’) Stevens and the Mailer of Why are we in Vietnam? James is telling his son what he tells us in Pragmatism: that ‘truth is made, just as health, wealth and strength are ...”