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“... less likely than Faulkner’s to be snatched into a metaphysical empyrean. She doesn’t, as Henry James would say, ‘cultivate the high pitch and beat the big drum’. What interests her is not so much their existential dilemmas as their physical and moral landscape, the enclosing objects, in which she allows herself virtually to disappear: their domestic ...”

“... fading agony was a frustration. He had lost his loss, which ‘leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.’ Emerson wanted readers to stumble over the Latinism that punctuates this numbed passage. James Marcus tells us that it is a botanical term for ...”

“... to control the overconfidence of the living: the singer in ‘Song’ urges her lover not to grieve, because, when dead, ‘Haply I may remember,/And haply may forget,’ a casualness which implies that he is not nearly as important as he might think. ‘Remember me,’ another dying lover pleads, before changing her mind:For if the darkness and ...”

“... suffering selves around him, thus in ‘Ceremony after a Fire Raid’: ‘Myselves/The grievers/Grieve.’ And, even when refusing to mourn, his verse is attuned to what occasioned the mourning of others. Meanwhile, Eliot was allowing his pronouns to be opened to the public. The ‘one’s, ‘you’s and, especially, ‘we’s of the wartime Quartets draw ...”

“... first beneficiaries, Macmillan paying the then record sum of £7000 for American rights to David Grieve in the (disappointed) hope of repeating the phenomenal success of her previous hit, Robert Elsmere. After the ending of the three-voller in 1894, and still more with the expansion of the market in the 1900s, the possibilities for large earnings from ...”

“... In ‘Margaret Fuller Drowned’, a sonnet of the early 1970s, Robert Lowell, whose ancestor James Russell Lowell had been skewered by Fuller’s pen more than a century earlier, sums up what’s commonly known about Fuller. ‘You had everything to rattle the men who wrote,’ he begins, addressing her as ‘the first American woman?’ (emphasis on the question mark ...”

“... pages put out by the same newspaper on 15 April 1998, in response to the box-office success of James Cameron’s film. The large print captions are devoted to the ‘notable passengers’ and ‘noted men’ on board the ship, and there are extended quasi-obituaries of many of them. But the Times also made an effort to record the names of all the missing ...”

“... soul,’ or would-be moving ones, such as the eight-word paragraph with which Bate invites us to grieve over Hughes’s death: ‘The jaguar was at rest in his cage.’ Particularly significant pronouncements or developments are delivered breathlessly, as so often in biographies that pander to a hunger for the sensational, in sentences that lack a main ...”

“... Harris) to admit that a sentence about a character paring his fingernails was inspired by James Joyce. Admit it he does not: ‘The phrase you quote is an unpleasant coincidence.’ Cumberbatch’s sweating intensifies. His jumper has been nibbled by the only moths on earth that are beneath his idol’s notice. Vladimir toys sardonically with the rook ...”

“... the first to receive his co-operation over the complete, ten-year span of its writing. The author, James Atlas, whose biography of Delmore Schwartz appeared in 1977 and who is the general editor of the Penguin Lives Series, was given full access to Bellow’s letters and unpublished manuscripts and final permission to quote all the passages he wanted to ...”

“... was an art critic and a poet. His poem ‘Exile’ began: I knew if you had died that I should grieve Yet I found my heart wishing you were dead. This found echoes in an untitled poem by Beckett, written first in French: I would like my love to die and the rain to be falling on the graveyard and on me walking the streets mourning the first and last to ...”

“... Jane Welsh Carlyle, Froude’s posthumous My Relations with Carlyle, and Alexander Carlyle and Sir James Crichton-Browne’s The Nemesis of Froude. Everyone has long since taken sides, if not with the tactless first biographer or with the vindictive and family-proud nephew then with Thomas Carlyle or with Jane, or perhaps with Carlyle with reservations, or ...”

“... like America. The most conspicuous instance was Eliot’s hero (and Boston’s own) Henry James, followed by Pound himself, Gertrude Stein, and just recently, that robustly American figure Robert Frost who, with his wife and children, had in 1913 taken up residence outside London, and from there, with Pound’s assistance and to considerable public ...”

“... as Fame deferring to Mortality. ‘Do not recognise me,’ his look said. ‘I am here only to grieve.’ Actually, compared with the soap-stars he hardly counted as famous at all. The world of celebrity in England, at any rate, is small. Whereas fame in America vaults over the barriers of class and profession, lawyers rubbing shoulders with ...”