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“... power, trope, work: these are the key terms of American pragmatism, found in Emerson and William James, to which Poirier would render literature accountable. They amount to an emphasis on the energetic process whereby meanings are created, opposed and altered in writing and reading. Emerson once said that the permanence of all books is determined by ...”

“... of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape (William Collins, £16.99):These radioactive hinterlands are the consequences of human folly, hubris, of deals made with the devil. That they have been badly contaminated is evident, but it has also been growing increasingly clear that the Dead Zone is not dead at ...”

“... of pedagogue to undergraduates, taking his first job at Amherst College in 1917. Pound, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane all lived by other means; though it’s worth pointing out that the poetry and criticism of Eliot in particular, and to a lesser extent of Pound, played a ...”

“... found a recommendation and where the queerness might possibly be stomached. I mean Blackwood.’ William Blackwood and Sons, publishers of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, had been stomaching queerness and Scotchness – and much else besides – for the best part of a century. In the event, they rejected Stevenson’s book, but his instinct had been ...”

“... What kept them going? Many sailors referred to comradeship as their finest memory of the Navy. William ‘Jock’ Batters (Plumber First Class) wrote in his unpublished memoir: When a sailor ‘belonged’ to a ship his main loyalty was to his ship and his mates. If they endured enough together, his family came second. How other can you explain the ...”

“... In the summer of 1797, William Godwin set out on a tour of the Midlands. He had hoped to visit, among others, Erasmus Darwin, but finding the naturalist away from home, Godwin asked Darwin’s wife for a letter of introduction to Robert Bage instead. To his surprise, Mary Darwin said she could not properly provide one since, though Bage was her husband’s ‘very particular friend’, she wasn’t sure she had ever set eyes on him ...”

“... Bellow replied that his study had been English literature. He was asked to give his opinion of William Wordsworth as a poet. He responded that he had always thought of William Wordsworth as one of the Romantics. ‘There is no place for you,’ said Chambers on hearing this, ‘in this organisation.’ The future Nobel ...”

“... of lesser-evil running mates for Roosevelt after the Democratic Party blocked the left-wing Henry Wallace from remaining vice president. ‘Who the hell is Harry Truman?’ William Leahy, Roosevelt’s chief of staff, asked. ‘I hardly know Truman,’ Roosevelt said. ‘He has been over here a few times, but he made no ...”

“... the Art Students League of New York in the 1950s. Dickinson had been a pupil of both Hawthorne and William Merritt Chase, who introduced the concept of the premier coup to American art schools. Unlike a sketch, a premier coup is intended as a work of art in its own right. Executed in a single sitting, it may share the unfinished properties of a preparatory ...”

“... When, in the summer of 1898, at the age of 56, William James went to Berkeley, California to deliver a series of lectures on pragmatism, he could have used his own life to illustrate the immensely difficult but successful application of one of its tenets: that truth is best seen as ‘what it is better for us to believe’, not as ‘as an accurate representation of reality’, and that what is better for us to believe is what can be ascertained only in and through our actions, not by consultation with fixed ideas or traditions or, notably in his case, by family example ...”

“... maps, full of trends and lines of force but most of the actual place-names missed out. I remember William Empson devising an Outline of Outlines, reduced in the end to a single sentence: ‘Everything is pretty all right because of science.’ Where are they now? Sunk back into the vast ocean of superannuated enlightenment. If we are to find the origins of ...”

“... few poems reach print unrevised, though some are more spontaneous than others. It is curious that Wallace Stevens, who rarely suggests the poetry of flashing eye and floating hair, was in fact a very spontaneous writer and did very little revision, as if, for him, the primary and secondary processes were virtually one and the same. Wordsworth, on the other ...”

“... in his title, ‘My Crow’ (other Carver poems are called ‘My Boat’ and ‘My Work’). As Wallace Stevens put it in ‘The Plain Sense of Things’, ‘the absence of the imagination had/Itself to be imagined.’ Carver’s deft, paradoxical allegory joins a distinguished tradition of Romantic birds, at once their author’s property yet elusive and ...”

“... to repeat Conan Doyle’s own roll-calls of the SPR’s most droppable names (Alfred Russel Wallace and William James belonged, and Freud was a corresponding member), Daniel Stashower doesn’t discuss the wider impact of the spiritualist subcultures that emerged in the wake of the war that cost Conan Doyle a son and ...”

“... as an episode in American history. Isn’t Trump just another Andrew Jackson, another George Wallace or William Jennings Bryan? ‘The people have a right to make their own mistakes …’ The people are always looking for a charlatan. Even the spectacle is nothing new. Demagogues are demagogues, always in love with ...”