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“... concerns the great dead, she became known in the 1980s as a champion of the language poets: Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, Steve McCaffery, Ron Silliman, Susan Howe, Bruce Andrews and perhaps a dozen others, who first published during the 1970s in a brace of little magazines, one of which bore the all too catchy name ...”

“... return to that fascinating graveyard of taste. How could the director of the National Gallery, Sir Charles Eastlake, one of the most discerning connoisseurs in Europe, have made such a mistake? One answer would be that he had not spent enough time in Spain. But genuine work by Velázquez had been accumulating in Britain. The great full-length portrait of King ...”

“... Corbusier, Haussmann (the ‘Alsatian Attila’), Malraux, Mary Wollstonecraft, poets (especially Baudelaire, though he appreciated Pope for his malice), Saint Just, the staff of the Archives Nationales – and might suggest an habitual intolerance. But he is really only intolerant of other people’s intolerance, of those impatient to inflict their own ...”

“... of individual poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, Muriel Rukeyser and Charles Tomlinson. In the notes Weinberger has glossed allusions, and brought together, as my quotations have suggested, an illuminating set of comments by Paz himself. Paz’s recurring references are to Baudelaire and ...”

“... angles it still yields riches. What fabulous chimeras they chased after, back then. In the wake of Baudelaire dreaming up his ‘correspondences’ of colour and sound, artists began to cherish the notion that every kind of sensory input might converge, so as to pitch participants onto some indefinable plane of transformed consciousness. Synaesthesia became a ...”

“... begins to ease up and move with him, in the manner of the city that Benjamin envisaged for Baudelaire. Rimbaud was not a flâneur. There’s too much of the forced march, and the habits of the robust boy from the sticks, in the way he gets from A to B. But in the Illuminations, the effects of parallax and the sense of landscape as a series of ...”

“... the acceptance of a scarcely very edifying abjectness which made him say that he ‘wanted to be Baudelaire and Rimbaud without the poverty and suffering’, or lament the truth of his one-time employer Logan Pearsall Smith’s dictum that ‘one can’t be fashionable and first-rate.’ Shelden does not make use of Powell’s account, nor does he quote the ...”

“... had a bad fit of the spleen.’ Spleen is the key to the temperament Gilmour conveys. Like Baudelaire, Lampedusa was prey to both spleen and l’Idéal: when he was touched by beauty, he wanted to push away the pleasure of it – a surrender would acknowledge its power and entail a diminution of mastery. Describing ‘the sorcery of illumination and ...”

“... not its leaders and lawgivers, who most deplored the paradoxical openness of its society. Baudelaire and Flaubert, who viewed the bourgeois with a hatred and disgust almost pathological in its intensity, hated in particular its most tender emotions. They were a sham, a pretence, a revolting hypocrisy. But in retrospect it can be made to appear that it ...”

“... in which Charlemagne fell’; and [Fowler] wonders whether Milton may be contrasting the greater Charles with his own later monarch, who went to Fuenterrabia in 1659 to engage in some ignoble diplomacy. This speculation ... provides a genuinely fascinating context for Fontarabbia; but it is a context which (like all scholarly contexts) defines the field of ...”

“... civilisations. But they belong to an honoured French literary tradition which includes Diderot, Baudelaire and the Goncourt brothers; and, like Malraux’s voluble conversation, they include remarkable insights. As Pierre Rosenberg, a curator at the Louvre, put it: ‘Suddenly in this torrent of words you find a sort of diamond.’ The final reproach ...”

“... came up to tell me it was closing immediately. The next day a makeshift fence surrounded it. ‘Baudelaire loved solitude,’ Walter Benjamin wrote, ‘but he wanted it in a crowd.’ Today any area that might attract a crowd has shut down and Governor Cuomo frowns on walks. You can still find ‘crowds’, but they’re made up of people you already know ...”

“... slight lyric grace’. He could now be mentioned in the same sentence as Catullus and Laforgue, Baudelaire and Gautier. He could be declared ‘a classic’, by a critic who was to spend a good deal of time deciding exactly what that meant. Margoliouth’s edition, The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, in two volumes, was in the same Oxford series as ...”

“... notions of her, I find, are at once detailed, puerile and unbending – a strange hodge-podge of Baudelaire, Mary Barnard and Ronald Firbank, all coloured still by the prejudicial fancies of a flannel-shirted, late Seventies lesbian adolescence: SAPPHO: short, dark in appearance, teensiest hint of a moustache – a cross between Mme Moller (high school ...”

“... surprising in view of the long-held belief that illness can heighten the creative imagination, as Baudelaire noted of the intensity of sound and colour experienced during convalescence. It is not just approaching health, however, but approaching death which clears the sight. ‘I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my ...”