“... In John Cheever’s​ Bullet Park (1969), Eliot Nailles, a mild-mannered advertising executive, is asked by an Italian doctor: ‘Why do Americans want to be immortal?’ Amie Barrodale’s first novel, Trip, offers a playful reformulation of this question. In some ways, it’s a send-up of a culture obsessed with ‘healthmaxxing’, where ageing and death are treated as intolerable embarrassments ...”

“... But even ‘figure’ seems too fixed a term for the melancholic, at times clownish narrator. John Berryman – one of Housman’s most creative readers, working him deeply into the fabric of The Dream Songs – catches something Housmanish in his prefatory disclaimer: ‘The poem then, whatever its wide cast of characters, is essentially about an ...”

“... for class insecurity. This underdog cockiness persisted for decades, serving as the driver of John Travolta’s sidewalk strut in 1977’s Saturday Night Fever, where disco prince Tony Manero eventually tires of Bay Ridge Brooklyn and his mooky friends as the magic spires of Manhattan beckon. A product of the jukebox era, Podhoretz belonged to an older ...”

“... for poetry that was really about something, he was in fact thinking of a poetry – Lowell’s, Berryman’s and Plath’s – obsessed with its own ego. In their case, a regal obsession. In Contemporary British Poetry the materials of fiction are put to quite a different use: the tyranny of the self has been replaced by a meditative sense of the texture of ...”

“... that include Rafael Alberti, Wang Wei, Catullus, Kafka, Laforgue, Rilke, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, John Peale Bishop, Attila József and the French poet Guillevic, with whose work Justice seems to have felt a special affinity. Yet Justice’s poems are never allusive or disjunctive in the high Modernist style. His versions of French and Spanish poems make them ...”

“... children, objects in his life which his poetry can rightly make nothing of, although Lowell and Berryman, in their obsessive way, made so much of them. So at least one would think. Dryden also would never bother us, we suppose, with his personal affections, however continuously witty he is on the subject of sex: but then he suddenly produces a most moving ...”

“... of its own. ‘Inspiration contained a death threat,’ Saul Bellow said in his introduction to John Berryman’s novel Recovery. ‘He would, as he wrote the things he had waited and prayed for, fall apart. Drink was a stabiliser. It somewhat reduced the fatal intensity.’ But Bellow was a wizard of urban reality who never understood the reality of ...”

“... Spectator where he found the famous pieces by J.D. Scott and Anthony Hartley, or the scripts of John Wain’s Third Programme magazine First Reading, or copies of the Reading limited editions of Wain and Amis. Mr Morrison claims to have eschewed gossip and attended instead to such questions as: ‘Did the writers know each other? Is there any evidence of ...”

“... visionary poet, to join the ‘visionary company’. Reading Crane – like reading Lowell, or Berryman, or Plath, among many others for whom Crane is crucial – one is never sure whether ambition is doing the work of the imagination, or whether ambition is the work of the imagination. This is the dilemma that makes American poetry of this century so ...”

“... naming of parts; to Dickinson, the blow of phrase upon phrase, their cause as chancy as their end. John Bayley, the most English of critics, looks for truth by resorting to foreign parts of it. Or by subjecting home truths to the stress of foreignness. Russia and the USA are his main resorts, the one for fulfilment, the other for provocation. But his criticism ...”

“... her predictions. 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 ...”

“... Tieck, who coined the phrase ‘romantic irony’ for the artistic apprehension of human duality; John Paul Richter, who invented the term ‘doppelgänger’; Schlegel, for whom, as for Coleridge, Shakespeare was a Proteus, and who wrote that dualism ‘is rooted so deeply in our consciousness that even when we are, or at least think ourselves, alone, we ...”

“... actual self that gets through life like the rest of us. In the descendants of Yeats, Lowell and Berryman, the deliberate creation of such a self in poetry became itself art’s function and justification. But paradoxically it is easier for a poet of this kind to avoid the poshlost process than it is for Pasternak. In the completion and creation of the self ...”

“... In​ ‘Dream Song 364’, quite close to the end of the sequence, John Berryman’s avatar/protagonist Henry is once more being remorselessly flattered. He has surely read everything there is to read. (One thinks of Mallarmé’s opening line from ‘Brise Marine’, ‘La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres ...”

“... though for me it spoils the ‘line’ of the poem – was reinstated at the petitioning of John Berryman in For the Union Dead (1964); a revised version of that is printed as a separate poem called ‘Ovid and Caesar’s Daughter’ in History (1973); and now Bidart and Gewanter have unearthed a seven-stanza monster that was printed in the Kenyon ...”