“... and delicately differentiated footfalls, her pallor and colour’ laid side by side with Wallace Stevens’s ‘sensory and technical virtuosity ... the almost imperceptibly modern, silver-chiming resonance of “Peter Quince at the Clavier” ’. These aspects of the ‘new’ poetry ‘do much to ameliorate popular displeasure’. Certainly ...”

“... of the work, and paeans to library architecture and stacks appear within the poems. Howe quotes Wallace Stevens’s ‘poetry is a scholar’s art’ while speaking of Emily Dickinson, but also (of course) herself. The library is her forest, and Howe is – with just one letter swapped – Hope.Recent textual scholarship focusing on Dickinson’s ...”

“... Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Sterling Brown, Gwendolyn Bennett, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Wallace Thurman and Rudolph Fisher. ‘The array of personalities in the literary area is startling,’ one of them wrote. ‘Few were born in New York, although we speak of the Harlem Renaissance. Claude McKay, one of the movement’s ornaments, was born in ...”

“... World War, alongside, in Europe, Four Quartets, Auden’s New Year Letter and H.D.’s Trilogy and Wallace Stevens’s Parts of a World in the States. Despite their desperate appeal to what he calls ‘the great incandescent power / of sublimation’ and renewal, Gascoyne never matched these poems of personal and spiritual crisis again. ‘The Post-War ...”

“... 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 ...”