“... explanation is that these suspiciously matching curves have a single cause. Already at work when Blake wrote about dark Satanic mills, it became more conspicuous when Elmer Drake struck oil and was thoroughly established by 1900, when one Englishman in ten was a coal-miner. The Industrial Revolution made a new civilisation, if we can call it that, sustained ...”

“... of parlance ‘Song, the Winds of Downhill’ works with a strange, disjointed syntax which, as Norman Finkelstein rightly observed in an essay on Primitive (1978), Oppen’s last book, ‘reflects the exact conditions of consciousness at the moment of composition’. This is not quite how it was with Discrete Series. Oppen had come far since the ...”

“... Shibboleth upon our tongue; By which with easy search you may distinguish Your Roman-Saxon-Danish-Norman English. His attack on English insularity, xenophobia and ‘absurd pride in purity of descent’ was part of a larger scheme to make the English see not only that their national affairs were tied to those of Europe but that they were ‘connected to the ...”

“... his friendships than in his loves. In 1967, in the United States, he met the translator and writer Norman Thomas di Giovanni, then in his mid-thirties. Over the next few years, as he moved to Buenos Aires, di Giovanni co-ordinated the translation of Borges’s poetry into English, using some of the best contemporary poets and translators such as Alastair ...”