“... LRB (5 August). The idea for the poem came from a comment in an excellent book by Tony Sharpe on Wallace Stevens, in which he speculates on the flocks of pigeons mentioned in the last lines of ‘Sunday Morning’: And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on ...”

“... Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva make appearances. Rilke drops in, mocked by Karl Kraus. Dante and Wallace Stevens are silently cited. Obviously there is never a dull moment, though the sum total of those moments seems duller than they are. There is an old argument about texture and structure in poetry, and John Crowe Ransom thought that although you had ...”

“... in drawing coy attention to its nonsensicality. The watchword of such verse should be a line from Wallace Stevens: ‘Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.’ The strange relation is inevitable to poetry, and to its supreme fiction, but to pursue it consciously is to achieve tedium, as Joyce does in Finnegans Wake. ‘Any poet is a ...”

“... of the koan. Emerson’s ‘All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle’ is the germ of a lot of Wallace Stevens; it has the quality of wonder. Poems, then, may grow out of aphorisms; they may also sink into aphorisms, as when Churton Collins scribbles on some famous lines of Milton: ‘We are no more responsible for evil thoughts which pass through our ...”

“... to the understanding of Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Yeats, as well as Wallace Stevens and still-living American poets. That concern with establishing a canon of great literature, and with the interpretation of all poems within the canon, is traditional to literary scholarship, and generally treated with scorn by theorists. Yet ...”

“... be found in Roy Fuller’s essay. Fuller rightly compares Kafka with that other insurance lawyer, Wallace Stevens, who, when the time came to retire, insisted on carrying on, since he felt that only by having his regular, quite unpoetical job to fill up his day could he go on being the instinctive and prolific writer he was. And he quotes ...”

“... was centred on London. Well, not all: Dreiser, Eugene O’Neill, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens (like Pound and his protégés, an early contributor to Poetry, Chicago) stayed behind; so did the group of young painters and photographers associated with Alfred Stieglitz’s quarterly Camera Work. Besides, it was always possible to import ...”

“... is called ‘Stratagems of the Spirit’. Its title comes from the book’s epigraph from Wallace Stevens (a poet who has always been important to Porter, and in interestingly varied ways). Stevens’s ‘Credences of Summer’ make his frequently-made post-Arnoldian point about the way a poetry must substitute ...”

“... the effect without any expectation of getting beyond the effect. Most, though by no means all, of Wallace Stevens’s poetry works on this principle. In Wordsworth the language of much of the Prelude is very different from that of a narrative poem like ‘Resolution and Independence’. Criticism of poetry in American universities, dominated as it is by ...”

“... I had gathered as a child. By then, I had become a secret devotee of snow: my favourite poem was Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Snow Man’, my favourite painting Pieter Bruegel’s Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap. The film scene that ran on a neverending loop in my head was the snowy automobile and sleigh ride in The Magnificent Ambersons; my ...”

“... and curve and tenor’ of the sky is poetry, you’ll like Romer. Certain phrases suggest that Wallace Stevens is the azure sea in which he would like to swim. But he has none of the rigour nor the glassy brilliance of Stevens’s impalpable lexicon. This, from the end of ‘Serenissima’, is typical: I decided my ...”

“... so much but was unable to construct a fully formed, readable dramatic character: because, as Wallace Stevens said, ‘no one is ever simply himself but is always compounded of other people.’ For Beddoes the self was a graveyard, and his own was cluttered with the bodies of Keats and Shelley, Marlowe and Webster. Writing tragic drama legitimised ...”

“... belongs at the bottom of Pope’s quivering bog. Hooker is convinced that Hill is the equal of Wallace Stevens and he is incapable of distinguishing a literary pastiche from a poem which can honour its influences. Quoting Hill’s lines, ‘Each day the tide withdraws; chills us; pastes/The sands with dead gulls, oranges, dead men,’ he fails to ...”

“... desolation gave me nightmares when I read it as a young child) just turns into premature Wallace Stevens, as Praed’s beautiful ‘Goodnight to the Season’ is Regency Philip Larkin. But all Victorian-and-later light verse has, I think, this pragmatic tilt to the depressing, perhaps in this case from the absence of what Nabokov called ...”

“... of Anti-Pathos’, which connects with sparkling audacity Brecht, Gramsci, Wyndham Lewis, and the Wallace Stevens who wrote ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’; it reappears in Chapter Nine, entirely concerned with American poetry and comparing Frank O’Hara with Ed Dorn (not the expected names? No, thank heaven); and in Chapter 11, where three English ...”